“Go away!” shrieked the QB’s voice from the bathroom.
I lowered the wine bottle and used the base of it to shove the door open.
A gray parrot. I should have known.
“Miss Wynncliffe-Jones?” someone outside the door shouted.
“Go away!” the parrot screeched, fluttering into the shower stall. “Go away! I want to be left alone!”
“Stupid bird,” I muttered.
“Same to you and twice on Sunday!” the bird cackled.
Maybe the bird was right, I thought. I saw a small red stain on the door, where I’d touched it with the bottle. I looked at the bottle. Around the base, I could see a few hairs stuck in something damp. Jet black hairs, with gray roots just barely showing.
Great. I’d not only found the body; I’d managed to pick up the murder weapon. I set it down on the dresser again, resisting the temptation to compound my idiocy by wiping it clean of fingerprints.
Instead, I walked over, unhooked the security latch, and opened the door.
“Miss Wynncliffe-Jones, it’s nearly—what are you doing in there?” The pink-clad priestess stood at the door, her hand raised to knock again.
A small bevy of costumed convention staff stood around her, their faces set in worried frowns.
“She’s dead,” I said. “Call the police.”
“Dead?”
“Dead, as in murdered,” I said. “Don’t come in here, unless you want to become suspects like me. Call the police. Oh, and another thing,” I added, glancing at my watch. “Send someone down to tell them to start the look- alike contest without her.”
I closed the door to shut out their questions. I figured since I was already in the room, I should wait here for the police. I didn’t fancy standing there, staring at the QB’s body, so I returned to the bathroom.
“Go away! I want to be left alone! Go away!” the parrot shrieked.
How odd, I thought. The parrot’s voice sounded eerily like the QB’s. Her words, her voice, even her angry, imperious tone.
But the parrot’s body language belied the confident tone of the words. It seemed terrified, fluttering wildly around the shower stall.
Was it terrified of me? Or still terrified by something that happened before I arrived? Would the bird be terrified if it had witnessed the murder? Possibly, I supposed. But I thought it more likely the bird wouldn’t react this way unless the killer had tried to attack it, too.
I moved a little closer, to see if the bird was injured. I wouldn’t have thought the bird could get more frantic but it did, and called out something else in the QB’s voice.
“I can do anything. I
And then the voice broke off into a sound that chilled me. A death rattle. Not that I’d ever heard a real, live person make that sound. Other than Dad, of course, who’d heard it plenty of times during his medical career, and had been known to demonstrate it at the dinner table for the edification of his children and grandchildren. So I knew this sounded like the real thing, and I wondered if the parrot had just repeated the QB’s last words.
Figuring I shouldn’t scare the only eyewitness, I left the bathroom and found a spot reasonably close to the door where I didn’t have to look at the QB.
And then, the minute it crossed my mind that I didn’t have to look at her, the temptation to look became irresistible. I craned my neck in a couple of different ways before giving up and stepping closer.
Not a pretty sight, I thought, feeling queasy. I couldn’t decide if her face was angry or terrified.
No sign of a wound on the front of her head. Or the sides. Odd. If she’d been hit on the back of the head, why had she landed face up? Maybe I was wrong—I’d have to ask Dad—but I had the distinct impression that if you coshed someone on the back of the head, they keeled over face first. Had someone moved her?
I inched forward, trying to see if there was anything that could explain this apparent discrepancy. From my new angle, I could see her right hand—before, the bed had blocked my view.
She was holding something. A small scrap of paper.
To get a good look at it, I had to lean over so far that I was in serious danger of falling on top of the corpse. But I did get a look.
It was the torn corner of a drawing. From a Porfiria comic book, by the look of it. A roughly triangular piece, apparently torn from the lower right corner of a page, and containing most of a single frame.
Just then, I heard a commotion out in the hall. Probably the police, I realized. Which meant that I didn’t really have time to study the scrap of comic before they barged in. Taking it out of her hand would be a stupid idea.
I reached into my pocket and found that I still had the tiny digital camera. I took half a dozen shots of the paper. And a few of the position of the body, and a few more of the surrounding clutter.
I had just barely stuffed the camera back in my pocket when the police walked in.
Chapter 15
The tiny digital camera in my pocket felt heavier with every minute the Loudoun County police spent interviewing me. I don’t know why the photos in the camera worried me so much. If they searched me and found them—well, it wasn’t as if they didn’t have plenty of reasons already to suspect me. I’d made no secret of how much I disliked the QB, publicly quarreled with her a few hours before the murder, and then capped it off by burgling her room to find the body. My fingerprints were all over the wine bottle they were testing to make sure it was the murder weapon. Surely the photos would add only a slight weight to the evidence against me.
And I wasn’t withholding anything the police couldn’t find themselves. From the sound of things, they were taking plenty of photos, not only of the QB’s room, but of Michael’s and my room as well, since the security latch meant that the killer had escaped the same way I’d entered. The cops commandeered Walker’s and Maggie’s nearby rooms to serve as their temporary base of operations. Presumably they’d move the guests of honor, en masse, to another wing for the rest of our stay. I had no problem with that. Another hotel would be even better.
I could tell they thought I was too bossy. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to do, trying to tell the first cops on the scene how to handle things.
“It might be a good idea to send someone down to the ballroom to tell them the QB—Miss Wynncliffe-Jones —isn’t appearing tonight,” I’d said when the cops arrived.
“Yes, ma’am,” the young officer said. I could tell he was being polite.
“You don’t have to tell them why, of course,” I said. “But unless you want a constant stream of people coming up to fetch her for the next several hours—”
“We’ll take care of that, ma’am,” he said, sounding slightly impatient. Great, they’d already pegged me as a troublemaker.
But by the time the homicide investigators arrived, twenty-two more people had joined the crowd sitting in the temporary waiting room. Detective Foley proved more open to my suggestion; and his taciturn partner, whose name I didn’t catch, went off to take care of the notification.
I considered it slightly unfair that, being the first person Foley talked to, I had to do all the work of explaining why he was investigating a murder at a hotel filled with papier mache palm trees and people in strange, unflattering costumes. Also more than slightly unfair that he made only the most perfunctory attempts to shoo away the parrot infesting his temporary interrogation room. I wouldn’t have minded if it had been the Monty Python parrot, or even the hysterical parrot from the murder scene, but this parrot’s repertoire consisted entirely of trite scraps of dialogue from commercials.
And I was so tired I’d started to nod off whenever Foley stopped to think.
“So, Ms. Langslow—” Foley said, jolting me back to consciousness.
“Do you suffer from heartburn?” the parrot chirped. “Try—awk!”
The detective, who had begun throwing wadded up sheets of hotel stationery at the parrot, scored a direct hit, and the parrot fluttered indignantly to another corner of the room.
