Gideon followed John's line of sight. At the back of a small table near the door, caught between the edge of the table's surface and the wall, was a foot-long strip of cardboard about a third of an inch wide, with scalloped edges and a slight curl to it. One side, the outside of the curl, was plain gray cardboard with some dabs of dried glue on it. The other was bright yellow, with a few printed messages in blue and red: “Clingier, clearer, stronger'...'250 sq. ft. (1 ft. x 83.3 yds.)'...'E-Z Open. Just pull off, starting here.'
They leaned over it, not touching it. “It's just a tear-off strip from a box of plastic wrap,” Gideon said.
'Yeah,” John said thoughtfully. “Now that's interesting.” Gideon looked up. What was getting by him now? “What is?'
'Well, for one thing, does Harlow strike you as a guy who'd just tear open a box and toss the strip onto a table? I mean, look around.'
John was right, of course; Harlow wasn't the kind of man who had much effect on his surroundings. Except for the table leg—and Harlow himself—nothing was messy, nothing was disturbed. Even the living-room wastepaper basket was empty.
'For another thing,” John said, “what would a guy who doesn't have any food want with a box of plastic wrap?” After a moment he added: “And where's the box?'
'I don't know, but what does it matter? For all we know, this has been here for months. Whitebark isn't the best-maintained place in the world.'
'Mm.'
'John, does this have some sort of significance I'm not seeing?'
'I don't know, Doc. It doesn't fit, that's all.'
Gideon straightened up, his head swimming. He'd been leaning over too long. He felt suddenly empty, drained of energy and acutely aware of Harlow behind them, of the caved-in skull and the wide-open mouth, and the hideous splatter.
He moved wearily toward the door. “I'd better go call Farrell,” he said.
* * * *
As soon as he'd given Honeyman the unwelcome news, Gideon did what he'd been wanting to do since the moment he'd stepped into the bloody nightmare of Harlow's cottage. He got under a hot shower, his second of the day, and scrubbed himself remorselessly down, sparing only his scraped shoulders. This urge to wash was something that asserted itself whenever his work took him away from dry, brown bones and brought him anywhere near the more gruesome bodily remains that too often came along with forensics. Gooies, anthropologists called them among themselves in moments of macabre but sanity-saving levity; gooies, or greasies, or sometimes crispy critters, depending on the particular kind of messiness involved.
Harlow most assuredly fit into the gooey category, but he was far from the worst case Gideon had seen. Yet the need to get himself clean had been unusually strong, a crawling, physical itch. He'd have tried some sandpaper on himself if he'd had it, and he'd never even touched Harlow. He stepped out of the shower stall and toweled himself dry, feeling better. Then, also for the second time, he changed clothes, unwilling to put back on what he'd been wearing. He shivered slightly when the cool, fresh cloth of the shirt touched his skin, and turned the air conditioner down a little.
It hadn't been just the physical ugliness of the scene that had gotten to him, he thought, although that had been awful enough in its own right. But this time there was more. The butchered corpse was no stranger, but someone he'd eaten with, laughed with, played poker with. True, Harlow had never been one of his favorite people, but a day or two ago he could have truthfully described him as an old friend. Today, of course, things had changed. In less than two hours the bumbling, plodding Harlow had metamorphosed into a cunning and resourceful murderer—and now into a murder victim himself.
Which brought up an almost equally disturbing thought. Whoever had killed him was surely an old friend as well, or at least an old acquaintance. There couldn't be much doubt that Harlow's murder was connected with Jasper's, and the list of suspects in Jasper's death was a small and circumscribed one.
And getting smaller. There was Callie, there was Leland, there was Les, there was Miranda, there was Nellie. That was it; all the people who had been at Whitebark Lodge when Jasper had been killed, and who were here now. Nobody else met both those all-important criteria. One of them, it would seem, had somehow been involved with Harlow in Jasper's death and the subsequent cover-up, had realized Harlow was starting to come apart, and had killed him before he gave it all away. That, at least, was the best guess of the moment.
Callie. Leland. Les. Miranda. Nellie.
Some were better bets than others. Miranda, he was glad to think, was among the least probable. If it hadn't been for her, they'd still all be under the illusion that the garroted man was Chuck Salish. And even if they'd eventually discovered that it wasn't—which probably wouldn't have taken long—the outlandish idea that it might be Jasper would never have crossed anyone's mind. Without Miranda, the skeleton would have remained an unidentifiable John Doe, and that would have been the end of it. No uncomfortable old questions raised about Jasper or anything else.
And Callie would seem to be off the hook too, assuming his guess at Harlow's time of death was anywhere near correct. Despite what Julie saw or didn't see during the trail ride, Callie had left for Nevada on Tuesday, a full day before he'd been killed. And she hadn't returned until this morning, long after it had happened. Or could she have planned it all ahead of time, made an unannounced, unseen return visit on Wednesday, killed Harlow, flown back to Nevada, then returned here on Thursday morning...? No, that was getting too fanciful. People might do such things in books, but he'd never known an actual killer to try it.
That left Les, Leland...and Nellie. Reluctantly, it was Nellie he kept coming back to. Nellie, who had pressed everyone to keep the disastrous roast a secret from the beginning; Nellie, who had headed the forensic team after the accident and signed off on the final report; Nellie, who had been so quick to suggest—to insist—that the skeleton was Salish's and not Jasper's; Nellie, who was even now maintaining that Jasper had been killed in the crash; Nellie—
He jerked his head with irritation, angry at himself. Nellie Hobert garroting Albert Jasper? Bringing down that table leg on Harlow's collapsing skull, not once but three times? No, he could hardly make himself imagine it. It simply wasn't credible. Not for any of them, really, but especially not for Nellie. True, he'd been a little cranky lately, but who could blame him, with the formidable Frieda hovering protectively around him, straightening his collar for him, stuffing frayed Kleenex down into his pockets when they stuck out, holding her hand out for his keys or coins when he unthinkingly jingled them...
