flight of steps, right along the next section of walkway, up a few steps, then left again. Some distance behind him the three larger men sprinted, the walkway vibrating under their pounding feet.
'Dammit!” John shouted as the manager vanished behind a corner, “hold up!'
Mr. Granle bobbed back into view. “It's here!” he piped.
'In there,” he said, as they reached him. Trembling, pale, he pointed to an open doorway ten feet farther on. A housecleaning cart stood innocently in front of it. Mr. Granle licked bloodless lips. “Do you mind if I don't—'
They rushed past him and into Room 50: John first, then Owen, then—hesitantly—Gideon, wondering uneasily if he shouldn't have waited back at the main building. What business did he have in here?
The room was a duplicate of his own. Double bed to the left, desk to the right, a table and a few chairs near the windows at the back. A large woman in a maid's smock lay groaning, her eyes closed, propped against the wall under the windows. At the right rear was the bathroom, outside of which was a sink and small open closet for hanging clothes. This area was separated from the main part of the room by a sturdy, burlap-covered partition with two clothes hooks in it at shoulder height. Tremaine's body was on the room side of the partition, suspended from a cord stretched up and over the top and attached to one of the hooks on the other side. At the hook itself stood Elliott Fisk, staring at them, motionless, his hands raised to the cord.
'What are you doing?” John said sharply.
Fisk blinked rapidly. “Doing? What am I doing?'
'Please take your hands off that, sir.'
'What? Of course.” His hands leapt from the hook as if they'd been slapped. “I was just trying to...it didn't seem right to just leave him...” He backed away, reaching behind him to brace himself on the sink counter.
'Don't touch anything,” John snapped.
Fisk jerked his hand back; clutched it in his other hand the way a child does to keep himself from touching something he isn't supposed to. “Touch? No, of course not.'
'Who are you?” John asked.
'Elliott Fisk.” He pointed distractedly at Gideon. “He knows me.'
John didn't bother to confirm it “What are you doing in here?'
Owen caught Gideon's eye briefly. What's going on? the look asked. John's treating this like a murder, not a suicide. Gideon gave him back an eyebrow shrug. He was wondering the same thing.
'Doing? I came to get Dr. Tremaine. He was late. You can ask the others. They—'
The maid gave a louder moan, one with her heart in it, and rocked her head back and forth. Her eyes were still closed.
The sound seemed to steady Fisk. Under his beard his little mouth firmed. “Look here, why shouldn't I touch anything? It's simple human decency to get him down off that hook. Just who are you, anyway?'
'Mr. Lau is with the FBI,” Owen said, looking a lot more official in his snappy uniform than John did in his washed-out blue denims.
The maid groaned again. A stocky, stretched-out leg quivered. The heel of her blue jogging sneaker thrummed on the carpet.
'Do you mind if I help this poor woman?” Fisk demanded. He didn't wait for an answer but boldly bent to her and began chafing the back of her hand. “There, there.” Startled, she stared confusedly at him.
'It's all right,” he told her earnestly, “I'm a dentist.” Such was the state of her mind that she appeared to be reassured. Fisk chafed some more. “Well now,” he said with empty professional cheer, “do we think we can get up?'
'I'll give it a try,” she said weakly.
With Gideon's and Fisk's help she got to her feet, then tottered from the room, leaning heavily on Fisk's unsubstantial but freely offered arm and keeping her face averted from the corpse. Once outside, judging from the sounds that came in from the walkway, she was received into the solicitous embrace of Mr. Granle and led tenderly away with much cooing and sympathy. John walked to the door and closed it without touching the knob. The three men studied the body silently.
Tremaine was wearing only a burgundy-silk bathrobe, tied at the waist. Open-backed leather slippers lay near his feet, one right-side up, the other overturned. A small, hard-bodied dressing case, also on its side, lay a few inches away. Tremaine's toes rested on the carpet, his heels just above it.
Owen waved vaguely at the dead man's feet and murmured something that caught in his throat. He tried again. “Rope must have stretched,” he said thickly.
'Yup,” John said. He was thinking, his hands on his hips, his feet spread.
'This is the first—” Owen began. “I mean, you'll probably think it's funny, but I've never—I mean, I've seen dead people before, but never a—” He realized he was running on and stopped. He rubbed the back of a forefinger across his upper lip.
Gideon looked at him sympathetically. He knew how the ranger felt. Asphyxiated people are terrible to look at, and Tremaine was no exception: thickened tongue pushed out obscenely, dried blood around the nostrils, protruding eyes, lips and ears a weird blue-gray, fingers clenched like talons.
At least Owen didn't look as if he were about to throw up, which was more than Gideon could say about his own first experience in similar circumstances. He had done it into a stainless-steel sink in San Francisco's Hall of Justice, which, while demonstrating a certain degree of fastidiousness, had done little to increase the coroner's confidence in him.
'Uhh,” Owen said, and on second thought Gideon moved a step away.
Not that he wasn't a little queasy himself. It wasn't the physical horrors that got to him so much these days, but the pathetic little concomitants of death that were always there, one way or another. While Owen's eyes were
