“Good luck dragging him away from those Cassidy sisters,” Longarm said dryly.
For the first time, Longarm saw a faint smile on Mercer’s face. “Oh, he’ll come along. It’s a rare politician who can resist the lure of the press.”
Longarm chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder. “I reckon you’re right about that too. So long, Leon.”
He walked quickly back to where he had left the rented buggy as Mercer disappeared into the clubhouse in search of Senator Padgett. The afternoon had been surprising in more ways than one, Longarm thought as he untied the team from the hitching post and stepped up into the buggy. Whether it had been meaningful or not was something he just couldn’t say as yet.
He turned the buggy back toward the hotel.
As soon as he stepped into the lobby of the hotel after returning the buggy to the stable, he knew something was wrong.
Damned wrong.
Captain Bishop of the Albuquerque police was standing next to the desk, talking to the clerk on duty. The clerk’s face was pale and haggard, and his forehead had a sheen of sweat on it that Longarm sensed had little to do with the heat. The man’s eyes widened as he glanced over and saw Longarm coming into the lobby. He raised his arm and pointed at the lawman.
Bishop turned to face him, and the local badge-toter’s expression was grim. Longarm frowned as he walked quickly over to the desk. “What’s happened?” he asked.
“I’ve been wondering where you were, Marshal,” Bishop said without answering Longarm’s question. “Nobody around here seemed to know.”
“I went to the horse race,” Longarm said. “Anything wrong with that?”
“Did you place any bets?” asked Bishop.
Longarm’s frown deepened. “Didn’t feel like it.”
“You should have,” Bishop said coolly. “You were obviously running a string of good luck this afternoon. You’re still alive, and your friends aren’t.”
Longarm didn’t want to start cussing a fellow lawman in public like this, but he was getting mighty exasperated with Bishop. His jaw taut with anger, he asked, “What happened to them?”
“Come upstairs and see for yourself.” Bishop inclined his head toward the staircase on the other side of the lobby.
There were a couple of blue-uniformed officers at the top of the stairs, Longarm saw as he and Bishop started up to the second floor. He noticed now too that the lobby was empty of hotel guests. Clearly, the police had taken the place over and Clamped the lid on tight. Worry gnawed on Longarm’s brain. Bishop had said that the other three deputy marshals were dead, and Longarm had a pretty good idea what that meant. He didn’t expect to find those printing plates upstairs when he got there.
The two policemen stepped aside to let Longarm and Bishop pass. The first thing Longarm noticed as he and the captain started down the hallway was the huge bloodstain on the carpet runner, about halfway down the corridor. Right outside the door of the room where Bud Seeley and Horace Truelove were supposed to be standing guard over the plates, in fact.
Longarm’s insides twisted. Nobody lost that much blood and lived to talk about it. There was no corpse in the hallway, though. He said, “Where are they?”
Bishop grunted. “Inside the room. One of the other guests found that pool of blood and ran downstairs screaming. The clerk and one of the porters came up here and found the bodies inside. The clerk used his key to get in when he noticed more blood running out from under the door.”
Longarm’s face was frozen into a bleak grimace by now. He said, “I reckon they sent for you then.”
“The clerk had already sent another porter for the law. We got here a few minutes later.” Bishop had reached the door of the marshals’ room. He was careful not to step in the blood as he reached for the doorknob. The blood was mostly dry by now, but it would still be sticky. “You ready for this?”
Longarm took a deep breath and wished he hadn’t. The sharp, sheared-copper smell of spilled blood filled his nostrils. He managed to nod.
Bishop turned the knob and swung the door back. Through the opening, Longarm saw the bodies sprawled on the floor of the room. He steeled himself and stepped inside.
Jim Harrelson was the closest to the door. His throat had been cut so deeply that his head seemed to be barely hanging on to his shoulders. Horace Truelove was next. He looked like he had been stabbed at least a dozen times in the chest, and his throat was slashed as well. At first glance, Bud Seeley, who lay curled up beside the bed, didn’t seem to be injured at all. But then Longarm saw the wound in the side of his neck where a knife had gone in.
“All of them were killed quick and quiet,” Bishop said, “by somebody who knew how to use a knife. Looking at it, the blood out in the hall seems to have come from Harrelson. Most of it in here came from Truelove.”
“Son of a bitch,” Longarm muttered. Nobody deserved to come to an end like this, slaughtered like some sort of animal.
He forced his gaze away from the horrible tableau and looked around the room. There was no sign of the valise which had held the counterfeiting plates. That came as no surprise to him. He stepped over to the dresser, checked quickly through its drawers, then opened the doors of the wardrobe that stood against one wall. The meager traveling gear belonging to the federal lawmen was there, but no valise, no package of any sort that could have contained the plates.
“What are you looking for, Marshal?” Bishop asked sharply. “The ‘evidence’ you and Harrelson took out of that warehouse early this morning?”
Longarm didn’t see any point in keeping it a secret any longer. “The printing plates,” he said. “The ones Edward Nowlan used to make that two million in phony currency.”
