good. Her belly had been cut wide open.
The kitchen was a mess. Loose mail and newspapers were stacked on the counters, and the table was dusted with crumbs and splotches of purple jelly. I spotted the phone on the wall beside the fridge and started toward it.
“Clara!” someone called from outside. It was an old man’s voice. I put my ghost knife into my back pocket. “Clara!” he called again and stepped into the doorway. “Oh my Lord!” He moved toward the body, splashing the toe of one rubber boot in her blood. He had a double-barreled shotgun in his hands. Then he saw me.
“Hands in the air!” he shouted. I complied. “What the hell did you do here, huh? What did you do?” His voice trembled with rage, and I thought he might twitch hard enough to shoot me accidentally.
“Don’t pull that trigger.” I kept my voice calm. “The police will be here soon if we call 911.”
“I already have, smart-ass.” He smirked at me fiercely. He straightened his shoulders and brushed back his wispy white hair. He was posing like a hero. “Don’t wet your panties. I’ll just hold you here until the sheriff comes. Unless you try something stupid. Get me?”
“Got you,” I answered. He didn’t like my tone. He wanted me afraid, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
“Why shoot you when you can get the needle, eh? I hear that’s real painful, like burning to death on the inside. A man who murders a woman don’t deserve no better than that.”
He was a terrible bluffer, and I wasn’t spooked. He decided to drop it. We both looked at the woman on the floor. She was wearing a fleece pullover decorated with poinsettias. There was a little Santa pin on her collar.
She also had a white mark on her face, just like the well-ventilated gunman on the Wilbur estate. Because she was on her back, I could see the whole thing; it started near the point of her chin, ran across her lips, up her cheek, and onto her forehead. It was about the width of the pad of my thumb, and it looked very much like a bleach stain on cloth.
I had no idea what it meant, but I was pretty sure it hadn’t killed her. If it had, she wouldn’t have needed so many stab wounds.
Still, where had it come from? It could have been a birthmark or an old scar, I guessed, although the odds that a woman in a small town in the American Northwest would have the same mark as a hired thug from Hong Kong weren’t worth taking seriously.
Then I noticed the revolver in her left hand. It was big, clunky, and black, the sort of gut blaster home owners prefer—no concealment necessary.
There was a china plate on the floor by my foot. A raw porterhouse had been placed on it, but it was untouched.
So, the woman and the gunman were both armed when they were killed. The plate on the floor suggested a dog, and the expensive, untouched steak suggested even more.
My arms were getting tired, but I had no intention of asking permission to put them down. After a few minutes, Steve Cardinal stepped into the doorway. “My God,” he said when he saw the body on the floor. “Isabelle! What happened?”
“About time someone got here,” the old man said. He sagged, letting his shotgun droop, and slumped into a dining room chair. It hadn’t occurred to me that he would be getting tired, too. “I caught the feller. He was still standing over the body. Almost shot him, too.”
Cardinal looked down at the body, then at me. “Oh, Preston, he’s not the killer. Isabelle has been stabbed, and he doesn’t have a drop on him.”
“What?”
“Unless you found a spear in his back pocket. But thank you for calling me. One moment.” He took out his cell and went outside. It was only a minute before he came back in. “Bill and Sue are on their way.” Cardinal looked at me. “You can put your arms down, son. What are you doing here?”
Now he was ready to play the cop. “I heard gunshots and came out this way. I saw the open door and found her on the floor.”
Cardinal turned toward Preston and laid a friendly hand on his shoulder. He managed a smile, but it was strained and his face looked pale. They were two old men trying to find the strength to do an unpleasant job. “Preston, I need to ask you a favor. Go out to the street and look for the ambulance. If Stookie is driving, we’ll have to send up a flare to get him to the right address.”
Preston took a little white pill from a pill bottle and put it under his tongue. “I can do that.” He shuffled out the door.
Before Cardinal could start questioning me again, I asked: “She doesn’t live here, does she?”
Cardinal put his hand in his pocket. “Now, how did you know that?”
“When Preston came in, he was calling ‘Clara,’ not ‘Isabelle.’ She lives nearby, though? Lived, I mean.”
“I’m the one with questions that need answering, son. Having you pass the Breakley place just as it burned down—and that’s the only way you could have gotten into town from the estate—was quite a coincidence. This is too much.”
“You know something of my history, don’t you?”
“I can Google,” he said. “I know about the arrest in Los Angeles and the time you served. I know about the incident in Seattle last year, although some of the details don’t make much sense. Drugs, wasn’t it? Some kind of designer drug made a friend of yours go on a killing spree.”
He wasn’t even close to right, except about the killing spree. I felt a flush of shame at the memory, though. Not only had Jon killed people, he’d eaten them, too. I was grateful Cardinal hadn’t mentioned that, because if he’d read news reports on the story, he knew about it.
Still, “drug-induced psychosis” was the official explanation for the events of the previous fall when I tried to save my oldest friend from the Twenty Palace Society—and from himself—and ended up killing him instead. But that
