“I BELIEVE,” SAID SARAH, “THAT THE barbecue is now ready for the steaks. I believe it’s possible that the barbecue has been ready for the steaks for the better part of an hour. I would hazard a guess that we have used enough propane since you left to keep a family of four in Iceland warm for the better part of a December. The salad leaves are washed and dried and sitting in a bowl. Your children have decided that they’ve waited long enough to eat, and left five minutes ago with Paul’s friends for McDonald’s. I, however, thought it would be rude to leave and find dinner elsewhere, or cook up a steak on my own, and leave you to eat all by yourself when you came home, if you were ever to decide to do such a thing.” She paused. “Are you there?”

“Yeah,” I said. The splotches of blood on Stefanie Knight’s off-white suit looked black as night.

“So are you coming home or what? Or should I go ahead and eat without you?”

“I think you should probably go ahead and eat without me.”

I could hear Sarah breathe in, startled. “What’s wrong? Oh God, have you had an accident or something?”

“No, I’m okay. I just kind of got into a thing, and I’m going to be a little bit delayed, that’s all.”

“What sort of a thing?” Sarah was over being sarcastic. Now she was worried.

“Uh, it’s Kenny,” I said.

“What about Kenny?”

“His wife. She’s been sick, and we got talking, and I couldn’t just walk out on the guy, you know. He needed someone to talk to.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” Sarah said. “What’s wrong with her?”

“It’s, uh, you know, a thing. One of those female things.”

“Is she in the hospital?”

“Yeah, she’s in the hospital. He was going to go see her as soon as he closed up the shop.”

“Is she having an operation? A hysterectomy? Is it cancer?”

For a writer, I was having a hard time making this up as I went along. The black puddle on the concrete garage floor was getting larger, ever so slowly.

“I think it’s some sort of an injury,” I said. “She might have fallen.”

Sarah was thinking. “So it’s a female thing, but it might be an injury. What did she do, Zack? Fall on her uterus?”

“I could have some of the details wrong. Kenny doesn’t seem to know. Or at least he didn’t tell me.”

I could picture Sarah shaking her head on the other end of the line. Even though she’d never met Kenny’s wife (I had never met Kenny’s wife; I wasn’t even sure that Kenny had a wife), that didn’t make her any less sympathetic.

“You’re a good friend of his,” Sarah said. “I mean, God knows, you’re in his store all the time. You tell him that if there’s anything we can do, just ask.”

“I’ll do that. He’ll appreciate that.”

“Just take whatever time you need. We’ll do up the steaks when you get home.”

“No, you go ahead and eat. I’m not, honestly, I’m not even that hungry anymore.”

“Okay. I’ll see you when I see you.”

I pressed the “end” button on the phone, but I didn’t slip it back into my jacket. I held it in my hand for a moment, thinking that it was time to press 911. This was no crank call. I wasn’t pretending to be dead at the bottom of the stairs. There was no car hidden around the corner. What we had, ladies and gentlemen, was a legitimate emergency on our hands here.

I pressed the “ 9” on my phone. Then I pressed the “ 1.” I was about to press the “ 1” a second time, but my index finger hung over it, half an inch away.

Just hold it a minute there, pardner. Think about this. Think about this really hard.

What would Detective Flint’s first question be? How was it, exactly, that I came to be at this address, and to have found Stefanie Knight’s body?

Was I a friend of Stefanie Knight’s? No.

But I knew Stefanie Knight? Not really.

Then how was it I happened to be in her garage and found her body?

Well, that was an easy one. I was here to return the purse I’d stolen from her.

And slowly I pulled my finger away before I punched in the last digit of 911. I slipped the phone back into my jacket.

This was, I told myself, a very bad situation. A very bad situation that could get a whole lot worse by calling the police and hanging around to answer their questions.

And yet, didn’t this go against everything I believed in, everything I’d ever told my children? How many clichés had I uttered over the years? Here’s a sampling: Don’t be afraid to get involved. Treat others as you would have them treat you. Don’t walk away from trouble. Own up to your mistakes.

And of course, my personal favorite: The policeman is your friend.

I was not sure, in this particular instance, that that was the case. I suspected that the policeman would not be my friend, and that by calling one, I might end up with a new roommate named Moose, who’d sleep on the lower bunk and want me to be his dance partner.

It’s probably worth pointing out at this juncture that I do not have what you’d call a long history with the law. I am not the kind of person, as you’ve probably gathered by now, who’s “known to police.” I’ve always played by the rules, paid my taxes on time, pled guilty to parking offenses and mailed in my check within a day of finding a ticket under my windshield.

So it’s safe to say that if the police were to find a woman dead in her garage, I would not be on the list of usual suspects. However, I could probably jump to the front of that list in no time by placing a call to the authorities to report the murder of a woman whose purse I had stolen only a couple of hours earlier.

As bad a day as I seemed to be having, I had to concede that it was a picnic next to the one Stefanie Knight had put in.

First, her purse is stolen, and when she finally finds a way home, some nutbar smashes her head in. What were the odds that two things that bad (the second one being considerably worse than the first) could happen to one person on the same day?

Unless, of course, the two events were related.

I was feeling pretty sick, and scared, already, but at that point a new chill swept through me.

Surely, there was no connection. It simply wasn’t possible that my taking this woman’s purse could have had, in any way whatsoever, anything to do with her death. The police might think so, but that would be an opinion formed through only a cursory inspection of the facts. I knew better. Just because two things appeared to be connected didn’t mean they were.

Then again, they might be.

I pictured the leather purse back in my car, and thought about what might be inside it. As much as I had regretted invading Stefanie Knight’s privacy by taking something that belonged to her, that ship, as they say, had sailed. The time had come to be a bit more intrusive.

But not here. I had to get out of here. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that the person who had killed Stefanie Knight might still be in the house, or returning to it shortly. It was time to get the hell out.

I unlocked the regular door that led from the garage to the outside, the one I’d peeked through earlier, and quietly walked down the driveway to my car parked at the curb. I unlocked it, got behind the wheel, and slipped my keys into the ignition. And stopped.

Fingerprints.

What had I touched?

A deadbolt, for starters.

And the front doorknob.

And the door to the laundry room, and the door from the laundry room to the garage, and the light switch, and the door from the garage to the outside…

I thought that was it.

I reached around into the back seat, where we keep a box of tissues on the floor, and grabbed a huge wad of them. There was no one on the street, so I got out of the car, walked back up the drive. I’d never relocked the front door, so as I turned the knob I wiped it down, then the inside doorknob, and the deadbolt. From there I went to the laundry room door, wiped down both knobs, then the door to the garage. It had a safety hinge, so the door would swing closed on its own to keep residents safe from a car spewing exhaust, and I didn’t think I had touched the inside knob, but wiped it down just the same. Then the light switch, and the knobs on the door leading out of the garage.