* * *
Mr. Albert Wilkins was dead, and there was no arguing that. He sprawled across his bed, one arm hanging down. His eyes weren’t open, but the rope around his neck, the angle of his head, and the blueness of his face made it clear.
The blue might have been due partly to the cold in the room. The window was open and the cold mountain air hung still in the room like death. The sheriff pushed past us and stepped over the shards of the wash basin Mrs. Holt had dropped when she’d opened the door. The water from that basin had washed across the hall, but some was in the room, and it was already looking a little slick and icy around the edges.
The sheriff swore, leaned out the window, and then swore again. Then he turned and came back at us.
“He did not get out!” he said. “He did NOT get out.”
He rushed back out and headed down the stairs to chase after his prisoner. I looked at Casey, my wife and partner.
Casey stood in the doorway, stiff and alert, like an animal sniffing the wind. She was only about seventeen—I didn’t know exactly because Casey wasn’t one for giving out personal information, even to her nearest and dearest—but she was a sharpshooter and tough as any six guys I’d met. I was in my twenties, and pretty fast on the draw, and I could maybe look big enough to intimidate if I remembered not to grin or talk too much. But the pair of us were short on experience and reputation, and I could see we were going to get the blame for this. We had been hired to keep the half-alive Mr. Wilkins from becoming all dead, and we had somehow failed.
“He get past you?” I asked. She gave me a hard look. I tried to judge if she was angry at herself for screwing up, or at me for asking. I decided it was at me—which meant old Cherty Stevens had not got past her. And I knew he hadn’t got past me.
I paused to look at the body. The rope around his neck was bent with old marks, like it had been put to other uses for most of its life. I pulled back the blanket and saw that the bandages around his gut showed little blood. As far as I could tell, he probably had not struggled, and had died quickly.
Case crept up behind me and looked hard at the man’s face. She didn’t bother to look at anything else, because she left things like that to me. His distorted face, though, she took in as a point of honor—something to get revenge for, or something to remember in case it turned out to be our fault.
No snow had blown into the cold room. The window was sheltered by the alley. I closed it and glanced around. Other than the bit of wet where the sheriff had walked in with snow on his boots, there was no sign of snow or slush. No boot prints from the window. Nor had I seen any in the snow outside the window, one story down.
Sense said the killer was somebody from inside the house, but I didn’t believe it. It was Cherty, it had to be.