Free Beyond Obsession by Richard; Hammer

She just kept talking to this guy.
    â€œWhen the service was over, I was standing at the back of the funeral home while they were taking the coffin out the other way, and she came out past me, and she couldn’t have been more than a few feet from me and she was laughing and talking with this guy and she wasn’t broken up at all. I said to my mother later, ‘I can’t understand it, she wasn’t upset at all.’ Then somebody pointed out the sister to me, and I went over and spoke to her, and she was all, like ‘Oh, my poor sister,’ she was just all broken up and crying so hard she couldn’t speak to me, and her brother was holding her up and helping her out. That day you would have thought they were this close, extremely close; only I knew they hadn’t even had anything to do with each other for years and years.”
    From the funeral home the procession wound its way to the cemetery. There, as he had in the chapel, Archbishop Whealon conducted the service. When he finished, the prayers for the dead said, the services over at the graveside, just as people were getting ready to leave, Karin rose and went to the funeral director. She told him to start filling in the grave immediately. He was stunned. It shouldn’t be done, he said, until after everyone was gone. Karin wanted it done then. She wanted no delays. He finally agreed. But except for a shovelful, to show that he was complying, the grave was not filled until the cemetery cleared.
    The mourners filed from the cemetery toward the waiting cars. Karin, with Alex Markov at her side, moved toward the limousine that had been rented for her. As she was about to get into it, Lori DeLucca, who had known Karin since fourth grade and had once been a close friend, remembers distinctly, for it was something she could not forget, Karin’s turning to the crowd and saying, “Will everyone clap as I make my grand exit?”
    The mourners gathered at the Duboises’ that afternoon. There was nowhere else to gather. Though Joyce’s mother, sister and brother appeared for the funeral, gathered around Karin and offered her their support, support that increased in the time ahead, they had been estranged from Joyce for years, and Karin had little fondness for them. She would not hear of their receiving those attending the funeral. The proper place was where she was, and that was at the home of the Dubois family.
    Soon after she reached the house, Karin went into the kitchen. Lori DeLucca happened to be in the room. Karin picked up the phone and dialed. “I need to talk to you,” she said into the mouthpiece. “I’m okay. But, oh, boy.” She hung up, turned to Lori and said, “Dennis will be stopping over pretty soon.”
    Dennis had not seen Karin since the moment he left his home for work the morning after Joyce’s murder. Later that day she had settled in with the Duboises. They had spoken briefly on the phone once or twice, including the call in which she had given him the names of Reese Norris and Hubert Santos as criminal lawyers who might be able to help him, but that was all.
    It was not long before Dennis Coleman arrived. He had not been at the funeral services. He and Karin greeted each other. Lori DeLucca and several others saw them standing in a hallway, then walk away and disappear into a bathroom.
    Out in the living room Jeff Sands looked around and saw that Karin was missing. Somebody said she was in the bathroom with Dennis. He walked that way and spotted them through the open door. It was the first time he had ever seen Dennis Coleman, though over the week since the murder he had heard his name often and had become increasingly suspicious of him, increasingly convinced that Dennis was the murderer of Joyce Aparo. “They seemed to be a little agitated,” he remembers. “I stuck my head in and said, ‘Is everything all right, Karin?’ She said, ‘Yeah, no