God damn it, I thought.
Whoopie! I thought. Yaahoo!
Elation and despair were sisters after all.
I called her back: got the recording. When the beep came, I pictured her sitting in the kitchen listening to my voice. Insanity, the third sister, took over. I got real close and crooned into the phone. “Oh, Ruuu-ta! This is the mystery voice calling! Guess my name and win a truckload of Judith Krantz first editions. Ooooh, I’m sorry, I’m not George Butler the Third! But that was a fine guess, and wait’ll you hear about the grand consolation prize we have in store for you!
Convulsed with laughter, I was sure.
Too weak to call.
Savoring my wit in her solitude.
Damn her.
I worked it off. In a bookstore there’s always something to do. I had a small stack of low-end first editions that needed to be priced, so I did that. I watered Miss Pride’s plant again, and studied the AB. I read for an hour. Sometime after two o’clock I fell asleep in the big deep chair near the front counter.
I opened my eyes to a feeling more desolate than despair. This was not the aching loneliness of new love, it was something far more desperate and immediate. The street was still dark: the world outside was hollow and empty and nothing moved anywhere. The store was like a tomb: still, silent, eerie.
Maybe I’d been dreaming. I hadn’t had the Jackie Newton dream in months. Maybe that had come back and I just couldn’t remember.
Then it came to me.
It was that sourness I had noticed when I’d first opened the door. It was stronger now, ripe and distinct, almost sweet in a sickening kind of way. When you’ve been in Homicide as long as I was, that’s one thing you never forget.
The smell of death.
I got up and went toward the back. The smell got stronger.
Oh boy, I thought.
I opened the door to the office. I turned on the light. Nothing looked wrong. It was just as Ruby had said: everything shipshape.
But the smell was stronger.
There was one place Ruby couldn’t have seen—the bathroom across the hall. That room had no windows, nothing but a skylight, no way for anyone to look in.
I opened the door. Miss Pride stared up at me with glassy eyes. Peter sprawled across her, facedown.
Each had been shot once through the head.
The killer had come in just after closing time. Miss Pride had not yet locked the front door.
He had come for a single purpose. No money was missing. No books were missing. He had come to kill. By the time I tried returning Miss Pride’s call, at five-twenty-five, she and Peter had probably been dead ten minutes.
He had come through the front door. We keep the back door locked. He had forced Miss Pride to lock up—her keys were still clutched tight in her fingers—and afterward he had used the back door to escape. Unlike the front door, which must be locked with a key, the back door had a latch lock that could be slam-locked from the outside.
The weapon was probably a .38. Ballistics would tell us more.
Miss Pride had been shot first. The shot had hit her in the front of the head, exactly between the eyes: she had fallen over on her back, her head twisted grotesquely against the wall.
