He didn’t like to do it, but he knew the practice: William Fitzgerald braced his legs and drew the sharp edge of the knife against the soft throat of the man sitting in his office. His legs jerked and his eyes rolled back toward him but whatever he wanted to say puffed out of the broad gash in his throat and was lost in the deepening twilight.

William Fitzgerald stripped the gloves from his hands and tossed them into his former client’s lap. Later, he’d burn them separately: one in an incinerator and one in a bonfire, trash in a trash disposal and careless loss in the other. He tipped the man’s chair back and onto the small rug he kept in the center of the room, levered him out and rolled him tightly enough into the rug. It made a suspicious-looking package, but William Fitzgerald was a suspicious-looking man; humping a body-shaped rug down the stairs wouldn’t make him any more noticeable.

He was out of sorts by the time he tipped the remains over the bridge railing and into the rush of the strait. It was far past his working hours, and he resented the additional and necessary sobriety. The murder itself bothered him not at all; some men deserved to die, but all men were doomed to it regardless.