A Heart Beat — Saturday, March 2, 1991, 5:41 PM

Sat, 02 Mar 1991 17:41:00 +0000

Cherry Hills Village, Colorado

Denver, Colorado

The footlocker sat open on Emerson’s kitchen table. Good oak, meant for dinner guests who stopped coming six years ago when the second wife packed her Samsonite and took the Volvo north on I-25. Now it held stoppered glass vials in wooden racks, a leather folder, and a sheaf of notes in handwriting that belonged to a dead man’s employee.

Theresa hadn’t sat down. She stood at the table’s edge with her hands flat on the wood, spine straight, weight forward – lab posture, Metro State posture, the body defaulting to the only stance it trusted. She read the labels before she touched anything. The overhead fluorescent buzzed at a frequency she’d never noticed when she was alive. She noticed everything now. The click of the furnace cycling. The tick of ice reforming in gutters outside. Four floors up, Windsor’s heartbeat – steady, sixty-two beats per minute, the sleeping pulse of a man with no reason to be afraid.

Chapter 4 — Resolution on Chicago Chronicles

A Heart Beat — Saturday, March 2, 1991, 5:41 PM