Excerpt from Death on Delivery

CHAPTER 1 Warmkessel
"Ve grow too soon old und too late smart."

West Side Tower Apartments. Tuesday. Noon.
Warmkessel surveyed the crime scene with a rising sense of panic. In the doorway of the plush dining room, he paused to steel himself against the anticipated sight. From this angle, only the back of the victim''s head was visible over the high backed chair. Tall one this time he deduced. He drew nearer, stopping as he reached the body.

The dead man sat well back in the chair, his left arm resting on the table, his right dangling over the padded arm, as if he had merely dozed off after a particularly fine meal.

Warmkessel moved off, making a quick but thorough tour through the other rooms. The entire apartment was large, airy, finely furnished and neat as a pin. Reluctantly, he returned to the dining room.

The body was neat too. No messy blood spatters to analyze. No ugly bullet holes to measure.

"Positively dainty," Warmkessel muttered to himself.

Even the still body seemed, at first, curiously to be merely part of the decor, no more bizarre or incongruous than the horns of deer and elk adorning fireplaces in Plainfield's West End. At first. Until he saw that, like those tributes to virility, the corpse too, seemed to appraise the enigmatic doings of man with eyes wild with fright.

Man, or, he muttered, more likely in this case, woman.

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