Private investigator Ian visits his friend unannounced, only to discover the man lying in bed, not asleep but dead. Ian resolves to find out how his friend died and, if he was murdered, to bring the killer to justice. But the details of the case are bizarre: the door of the condo unit is locked and the only other occupant is a bodybuilder, Horst, found sitting on the living room couch, half asleep or drugged. Ian calls 911 and the cops, when video footage showing no one entered or left the condo around the time of death, fixate on Horst as the most likely suspect. Ian is convinced Horst is innocent and offers his services to help the police solve the mystery of his friend’s death. But the situation is complicated, not only by the self-contradictory nature of the physical evidence, but by the fact that Ian increasingly finds himself drawn to Horst. Worse, the lead police detective shows increasing signs of interest in Ian himself. Love and death become strangely intertwined, their resolution not easily discovered. Is Horst as innocent as Ian believes? Can Ian help solve the locked-room mystery?

Bliss

About twenty minutes later we took the document and a tape measure and went into Quentin’s bedroom.


On the wall opposite the door into the room there was, left to right, a chest of drawers, a large mirror, a wardrobe—odd, since there was a walk-in closet opposite the window—and then another chest of drawers.


I unrolled the document. It was a diagram of the condo, showing all the rooms, electrical outlets, plumbing—everything. And for each room dimensions were given for each built-in feature, such as doors and windows.


I examined the dimensions for Quentin’s bedroom. Horst took the end of the tape measure and went to the left hand end of the wall we were regarding. Murmuring, “four feet, two inches,” I pulled the tape to the right until I had the distance indicated from the left hand corner.


It was just inside the left hand frame of the wall mirror.


Chapter 26