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"Good god," Fowler whispered.
Garreth swallowed.
Under the blankets, Holle's body lay face down. A wound gaped in the
throat, pulled into a spiral by the near one-eighty twist of the neck.
"Arguing with you is becoming fatal, Mikaelian," Girimonte said. "You
didn't happen to be restless and out driving after the party last night, did
you?"
Anger flared at the acid edge on her voice. "I was home sleeping it off
like everyone." Beneath the anger, however, consternation churned in him.
Irina. It had to be Irina doing this, logic said, though why she could be so
desperate to cover her tracks he still had no idea. Lane, his gut insisted.
She has the motive, Mikaelian. But how could it possibly be Lane?
His only answer was her laughter echoing in his head.
Harry dropped the blankets back into place. "Van-" he began sharply, only
to glance at Fowler and break off. Torn between loyalty to his old partner and
the desire to avoid arguing with the new one in front of an outsider?
That, too, Garreth reflected, but something else also showed in the almond
eyes, something new that tightened his throat . . . uncertainty. In his head,
he watched the fires on the bridge blaze higher.
The doorbell rang downstairs. Over the hall railing, Garreth saw one of the
uniformed officers from the black-and-white responding to the initial call
open the door. The team from the crime lab trooped in with its equipment.
"Up here, Yoshino," Harry called down. "If you need us, send a uniform to
the library. Where we'll be listening to what our witnesses have to say before
we make accusations, right, partner?" he said to Girimonte, and headed up the
hall toward the front of the house.
Today the library looked incongruously cheerful. Someone had opened the
drapes and light flooded the room. Three guests waited with the housekeeper:
an attractive dark-haired woman and a young couple who looked pasty-pale under
their tans and sun-streaked hair.
Garreth moved around the walls to stand by the fireplace, as far from the
windows as possible.
Harry slid the doors closed. "Thank you for waiting. I'm Sergeant
Takananda. This is Inspector Girimonte, Officer Mikaelian, and Mr. Fowler. Mr.
Fowler is a writer riding along with us to do research for a book. Does anyone
have objections to talking with him present?"
After a quick glance at each other, the guests and housekeeper shook their
heads.
Harry smiled. "Then shall we begin? You are?" He pointed first at the
darkhaired woman, then the couple.
"Susan McCaul. That's spelled M-C-C-A-U-L."
"Alan and Heather Osner," the man said.
"You're all guests and were sleeping in the house last night?"
They nodded.
"When did you last see Mr. Holle?"
"As everyone was leaving for the ballet," the housekeeper said. She fished
a sodden tissue out of her dress pocket and mopped at a new flood of tears.
McCaul bit her lip. "We all got back about one-thirty. He bolted the front
door and was headed in the direction of the kitchen when I went upstairs to my
room."
Osner nodded. "He said he was going to check the rear door and turn on the
security system."
"I heard him coming up the back stairs a little later," Osner's wife said.
"Did anyone see or talk to him after that?" Girimonte asked.
They shook their heads.
Harry said, "What sounds did you hear later on in the night? We need to
know all of them, even something you might think is insignificant."
"I didn't hear anything," McCaul said. "I went to bed and d-" She broke
off, throat working, then a breath or two later, stumbled on in a strained
voice: "I went straight to sleep. The next thing I heard was-was Ms. Edlitza
screaming."
"Me, too," Mrs. Osner said.
Her husband nodded. "I slept straight through."
The hair raised on Garreth's neck. "None of you woke up? Not for any
reason? No one made a middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom?"
"No." They shook their heads.
Then unless one of them was lying or walked in his sleep, the footsteps
Garreth heard had to belong to the killer. They sounded again in his head, a
stealthy whisper on the stairs from the third floor. God. He had fled from
them and left Holle alone to die.
"Ms. Edlitza," Girimonte asked the housekeeper, "were all the doors still
bolted this morning?"
The housekeeper nodded.
"What about the security system?"
"On and functioning."
"But someone got in past everything." Garreth raised a brow at Harry.
"Maybe we ought to find out how."
Girimonte snapped her notebook shut. "I'll check the ground floor."
"And I'll take this one," Harry said. He recorded the home addresses of the
three guests, then smiled politely at them and the housekeeper. "Thank you all
very much for your cooperation. That should be it for now, except I do ask
that you please keep out of the areas our officers and crime lab have marked
off until we've finished examining them for evidence."
Garreth caught the housekeeper's eye. "I'll check the upper floors, if Ms.
Edlitza will be kind enough to guide me."
Girimonte stopped in midstride heading for the library door and turned,
frowning. Harry hesitated visibly, too, but said, "All right."
The housekeeper followed them into the hall. As they reached the stairs,
however, Fowler started up after her and Garreth.
Garreth waved him away. Go with the others, he mouthed.
Fowler's brows rose, but after a moment, he turned and trotted downstairs
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