The Edit

It’s never a good idea to mix work and home life

Photo by Bill Adler

Nausea erupted up Detective Sanchez’s esophagus as he surveyed the crime scene. Books lined the wall-to-wall, teakwood shelving opposite the living room window. On the adjacent wall was a framed page of the New York Times bestseller list from June 11, 2020 and a photograph of a couple in their thirties on a beach, their arms around each other, both with broad, relaxed smiles, their shadows long. A thick, hardcover edition of the Merriam Webster dictionary and a photography book of 19th century New York City covered about a third of the glass coffee table in front of the leather couch. Next to the dictionary was a Moleskine notebook and a Bic ballpoint pen with red ink.

Sanchez snapped on rubber gloves and stepped cautiously around the body parts that littered the room. A hand with deformed knuckles lay on the couch’s center cushion, blood coagulated around the wrist. Strewn around the room, like somebody had been playing a macabre tossing game, were a leg with a knobby knee, an arm with eczema-covered scales, an ear clogged with wax, a crooked belly button, and a blond toupee whose underside was coated in sweat. A blood-soaked saber rested handle down at the intersection of two walls.

This murder doesn’t need a homicide detective, just the coroner, Sanchez thought. I could have been watching a Friends rerun.

“What happened here?” a rookie cop asked. He dammed his lips together tightly. His face changed color from pink to pale.

Sanchez picked up a toe with a bad case of nail fungus, slipped it in a Ziplock bag, and sighed. “He was a writer. He married his editor.”