Bookman's wake

doorway, heartsick with fear for Eleanor. My hand was trembling, I felt like a rookie cop at his first bad murder scene. I had looked upon more rooms like this one, streaked with red violence, than I could ever add up and count, and now I shook like a kid. There was still one room to check—the open door at the end of the hall.

I reached the dim circle of light and the music came up full as I peeped in. I almost laughed with relief— nobody there! The record player squatted on a table near the window, one of those old portables from the days before stereo. A 45-rpm disc spun wildly. The set was fixed to the automatic mode: the record would play like that forever, till the power failed or the needle wore the grooves off. It was starting again now, a concert from hell.

It was so loud I felt shattered by it. I had an urge, almost a need, to rip out the plug. The night-light flickered precariously, the bulb on its last legs. I found the switch and turned on the overhead, washing the room in light. It looked like a guest room: there was a single bed in a corner facing a portable TV set, a telephone on a table near the record player, a digital alarm clock. The bed had been rumpled but not slept in. Someone had lain or sat on top of the covering.

Handcuffed to the bed.

The cuffs were still there, one bracelet snapped tight to the bedpost, the other lying open on the pillow. The key had been left in the slot where it had been used to release the prisoner from the bed. The cuffs were the same make and style as the set Slater had given me. I came closer and examined the bed, turning back the rumpled folds of the blanket. There I found the book, no larger than a thumb joint, Eleanor’s miniature Shakespeare, her good-luck piece.

I fingered the soft suede leather, opened the cover, and looked at the publisher’s name. David Bryce and Son/Glasgow .

I put it in my pocket and came back up the hall. Last chance at the death scene, I thought. I was thinking like a cop, and I was not a cop, this was not my town. In an hour the room would be full of real cops. I stepped inside, giving the body a wide berth. I looked at Fat Willie Carmichael and thought, Talk to me, baby , but the fat man was keeping his last awful secret to himself. He had been taken from the front, stuck in the sternum with a weapon that was wicked and sharp, then slashed deep across the neck. Either wound was probably fatal, but the killer had hacked him up in other ways, as if venting some raging fury or settling an old score. His clothes were ripped apart: pocket change was scattered around, and his keys were thrown against the wall. The killer had been looking for the one key, I guessed, to unshackle his prisoner in the next room. I looked around the edges of the body: I could see his gun—he had retrieved it from the car and it lay under his hip, still in its holster. This indicated an attack of surprise: taken from the front, but too quickly to react. Or done unexpectedly, by someone he knew.

Time to call the cops, I thought. Out in the hallway, I smelled again that faint whiff of ashes. The office across the hall was thick with it. I looked into the room and saw where it came from—a wastebasket, half-filled with some burned thing, a bucket of ashes. I got down on the floor and touched the can with the back of my hand. It was still warm. I probed into it with my knife, carefully…carefully, lifting one layer away from another. Whatever it was, it had been thoroughly burned, with only a few solid remnants left to show that it had once been sheets of paper. Maybe a police lab could make something out of it; I couldn’t. Then I saw a flash of white—two pages fused together in heat, with small fragments un-buraed. And as I leaned over it, I smelled another odor, half-hidden under the ash but unmistakable if you knew it. Ronsonol. The can and its contents had been doused with lighter fluid to make sure the papers would burn. Some of the fluid had soaked into the carpet but had not burned because the fire had been confined to the inside of the can. Lighter fluid was a smell I knew well. It is one of the bookscout’s major tools, used for removing stickers from book jackets safely and without a trace. Paper can be soaked in it without getting stained, wrinkled, or otherwise damaged, unless someone remembers what lighter fluid’s really for and sets it on fire.

I sniffed around the can and again probed it with the knife. I worked the point between the two pages and jiggled them apart. The words still and whisp stood out on the unburned fragment, the two words arranged one over the other, at a slight angle, with the paper charred close around them. The lettering was striking and quaint: the typeface lovely. Here was the Raven , I thought. It might not make sense, but it looked as if Pruitt had it all along, lost his mind, whacked Willie Carmichael, and burned the damn thing. It didn’t make sense, I thought again. I parted the ashes and went deeper. There was only one other scrap with unburned letters: ange , it said. I took this piece, to have a sample of the typeface, and left the other segment for the cops.

I nudged off the light with my elbow and left the room as I’d found it. I stood for a moment in the hall, listening. But the record had numbed my senses, and now I had to concentrate just to hear the song.

I moved through the hall to the stairs. Looked down into the drawing room.

Something was different. I waited and listened and waited some more, but I saw and heard nothing.

It was my life that had changed. My dilemma. The universe.

I took a solid grip on the gun and went down quickly. Everything was turned around, like a house of mirrors at a carnival. There were two doors: I looked through the other rooms with that same sense of dread and found nothing: then went back through the hall the way I had come. I didn’t know what was eating me until I got to the kitchen. There’s more, I thought: I’ve missed something, I haven’t seen it all yet. I nudged open the swinging door, groped for a light, found it, flipped it, and saw what it was that I had missed.

The woman was sprawled in a lake of blood by the table. I had walked past her in the dark, so close I might’ve stepped on her hand. Like Fat Willie Carmi-chael, she had died by the knife—throat cut, body ripped and torn. I moved closer and looked at her platinum blond hair. I didn’t want to look at her face, but I did. It was Pruitt’s girlfriend, Olga.

Then I saw the footprints, my own, and, oh, Christ, I had walked through her blood coming in. It was like looking down and seeing your crotch covered with leeches: your skin shimmies up your tailbone and your gut knots up and you just want them gone. I didn’t even stop to think about it—the whole fifteen years I’d spent with DPD was so