calling her through the small broken windowpane.
***
Holstering his service revolver, Tony returned from the rear lawn, stepped into the brightly-lit kitchen.
Hilary was standing by the utility island in the center of the room. There was a knife on the counter, inches from her right hand.
As he closed the door he said, 'There's no one in the rose garden.'
'Lock it,' she said.
'What?'
'The door. Lock it.'
He locked it.
'You looked everywhere?' she asked.
'Every corner.'
'Along both sides of the house?'
'Yes.'
'In the shrubbery?'
'Every bush.'
'Now what?' she asked.
'I'll call in to HQ, get a couple of uniforms out here to write up a report.'
'It won't do any good,' she said.
'You never can tell. A neighbor might have seen someone lurking here earlier. Or maybe somebody spotted him running away.'
'Does a dead man have to run away? Can't a ghost just vanish when it wants to?'
'You don't believe in ghosts?'
'Maybe he wasn't a ghost,' she said. 'Maybe he was a walking corpse. Just your ordinary, everyday, run-of- the-mill walking corpse.'
'You don't believe in zombies, either.'
'Don't I?'
'You're too level-headed for that.'
She closed her eyes and shook her head. 'I don't know what I believe any more.'
Her voice contained a tremor that disturbed him. She was on the verge of a collapse.
'Hilary ... are you sure of what you saw?'
'It was him.'
'But how could it be?'
'It was Frye,' she insisted.
'You saw him in the morgue last Thursday.'
'Was he dead then?'
'Of course he was dead.'
'Who said?'
'The doctors. Pathologists.'
'Doctors have been known to be wrong.'
'About whether or not a person is dead?'
'You read about it in the papers every once in a while,' she said. 'They decide a man has kicked the bucket; they sign the death certificate; and then the deceased suddenly sits up on the undertaker's table. It happens. Not often. I admit it's not an everyday occurrence. I know it's pretty much a one in a million kind of thing.'
'More like one in ten million.'
'But it does happen.'
'Not in this case.'
'I saw him! Here. Right here. Tonight.'
He went to her, kissed her on the cheek, took her hand, which was ice-cold. 'Listen, Hilary, he's dead. Because of the stab wounds you inflicted, Frye lost half the blood in his body. They found him in a huge pool of it. He lost all that blood, and then he lay in the hot sun, unattended, for a few hours. He simply couldn't have lived through that.'
'Maybe he could.'
Tony lifted her hand to his lips, kissed her pale fingers. 'No,' he said quietly but firmly. 'Frye would have had to die from such a blood loss.'
Tony figured that she was suffering from mild shock, which was somehow responsible for a temporary short
