Page 32

“Landed, for sure,” said Doc, gesturing to the corpse that was supine before them, the rope still around his neck. “That part’s true.”

Doc pulled on a pair of latex gloves, crouched down on his uncertain knees.

“Blue lips, yep.” He lowered one of the eyelids, then examined the ruptured capillaries on the man’s now mottled face.

“Petechial hemorrhage, yep.” Ran his finger between the rope and the man’s neck.

“Yep.” He stood back up, his joints creaking.

“We’ll need an autopsy, of course, but I’d wager a dollar he died of oxygen deprivation. ”

“A noose will do that,” said Holly.

“Not necessarily,” said Doc. “No major bruising around the rope, which suggests the blood had already stopped circulating when the rope was tightened around his neck.”

Ned didn’t like the sound of this. “What are you saying, Doc?”

“Just that he may have been dead or dying before he was hanged.”

“Impossible,” said Holly. “He was alone in here, and door was locked from the inside—with a deadbolt. We had to break it down to get to him.”

“His feet didn’t touch the chair,” Miranda reminded her.

“He could have jumped,” Ned suggested.

“How would that have worked?” said Miranda. “He throws the rope over the beam, anchors one end, and then—standing in midair above the chair—manages to tie the other end around his neck?”

Ned had no answer to this.

“But there was no one else in the room,” Holly insisted. “I tried the windows. Those iron bars won’t budge, and the glass hasn’t been removed or tampered with. No one tied that rope around DePoy’s neck after he died, Doc. It’s impossible.”

“Impossible or not, I’m just telling you what I see here.

We got a team coming in from Portland tomorrow.

They’ll do a full postmortem. We’ll keep our guy on ice till they get here, but my gut is telling me he died of asphyxiation, but not due to strangulation.

The rope didn’t even crush his larynx. It was looped under his jaw.

A guy might even survive that. But he didn’t.

No bruising on the face, no injuries to the head or hands that I could see, so most likely it wasn’t an epileptic asphyxiation.

Not anaphylactic, either; his throat would be swollen like a bullfrog if that was the case.

Nope. He choked on something. L’ama’thut cun,” Doc said, looking down upon the deceased soul. “Safe journey, wherever it takes you.”

“Time of death?” Ned asked.

“An hour or so ago? Was easier to tell with the first one. He was still warm. This guy? Autopsy might give us a better idea. Hard to say.”

Andrew was disappointed. “On CSI , it’s always ‘The deceased died between 9:31 and 9:37 p.m.’”

“As I was saying earlier, this isn’t an episode of CSI .” Doc Meadows opened his case, unrolled a selection of forceps. “Lemme see, lemme see. Forceps for pulling sutures, for clamping arteries, ah! Here we go—Magill forceps. Used for intubation. That should do it.”

Long and flat and angled, with rounded circle tips, the Magill was ideal for extracting foreign objects lodged in the larynx.

Doc pried open DePoy’s jaw and peered in.

“Yep. Obstruction in the airway, all right.” Carefully, slowly, he inserted the length of the forceps into the dead man’s mouth, angling it in.

He jiggled it about a bit and then—“Bingo!” He extracted a wet wad of paper from deep within Fairfax DePoy’s throat.

“Must’ve tried to swallow it,” said Doc.

“Or had it forced into his mouth,” said Ned.

Doc Meadows spread the damp page open on the table with his latex-covered hands, flattening it out.

“What is it?” Ned asked, leaning in to look.

“Something typewritten,” said Doc. “Looks like a page from a story.”

“May I make a prediction?” said Miranda before she even stepped in to look. “The top right-hand corner, the page number. It’s 298, yes?”

It was like a magic trick.

“Cool! How’d you know?” asked Doc.

“Gentlemen,” she said. “I do believe we’ve found the missing page of John D. Ross’s lost manuscript. The very page that Kane Hamady was trying so desperately to find when he locked himself in the reading room at the bookstore. A page that someone was willing to kill for.”

Crowding in, Ned read what was typed on the mangled page. “It’s a list of murders.”

It was indeed: a murder in a swimming pool, blamed on a schoolteacher; a murder in a casino, blamed on a color-blind professor; a murder at a theater, blamed on the left-handed stage manager; a murder on the Rocky Mountaineer train, blamed on a cross-eyed travel writer; a murder at a horse track, blamed on the jockey’s rival in love; a murder at a political rally, blamed on the candidate; the murder of a nurse, blamed on the doctor; the murder of the doctor, blamed on a nurse; a murder at a lake, blamed on a retired ambidextrous ophthalmologist—on and on it went, multitudinous murders, filling the page, typed single-spaced in one run-on sentence.

At the bottom, the typewriting stopped and a handwritten note followed, scrawled along the bottom of the page:

If you find this, I’m dead and the race is underway.

Winner takes all, if he or she can solve the final puzzle: the killer’s real name, for there was only one killer over all these years, one killer behind each and every murder.

One killer and one name only. But who? You will find the answer at the end of the book that matters most.

Andrew swallowed. “It reads like a confession.”

“Or an accusation—from beyond the grave,” said Ned.

“Or a challenge to the reader,” said Miranda.

She was more focused on the state of the paper itself, on the myriad wrinkles in the page.

Doc had smoothed it out, but it had been crumpled into a small ball and then rescued from the wet confines of a dead man’s throat, so naturally the surface was soggy and crinkled.

But several distinct lines ran across the paper.

“Look,” said Miranda. “Here, here, and here.” She pointed out the creases. “The paper was folded. Three straight lines down the middle of the page, then three more on either side, spreading out like a fan.”

“Miranda, we’ve had two impossible crimes and two dead bodies, and you want to talk about the pattern of the creases on a piece of paper? It’s late. You can go home. And you, Andrew. You go with her. Doc, Holly, and I will take it from here.”

“May I see the deadbolt before I go?” Miranda asked.

Officer Holly, with Andrew’s help, managed to flip the door over on the floor with another heavy thud. On the other side, the barrel of the bolt was dented but intact, a circular metal chamber the length of someone’s forearm, with the bolt still firmly in place.

“Technically not a deadbolt,” said Ned. “That’s a basic sliding bolt. You lock it almost like you were loading a bolt-action rifle.”

A simple design. The barrel was attached to the back of the door, with a bolt that slid across into place.

Locked securely, it would have been impossible to manipulate from the other side.

Miranda looked again at the various cogs and bobbles that had sprung loose from the innards of the clock and were now scattered across the floor. She frowned.

“Don’t touch anything,” Officer Holly admonished. “I have to tent and photograph each of those.”

She went through, placing plastic yellow numbers next to each bit of potential evidence, as Miranda stepped back to consider the scene as a whole. It was like a scene written by Lachlan Todd.

Speaking of which...

“Elementary, my dear Fran.”

A snide voice from the doorway. Everyone turned, surprised by the figure silhouetted at the threshold. It was Luckless Lachlan himself, leaning against the jamb, arms crossed, head tilted, emanating arrogance.

“This is an active crime scene,” Ned said. “Stay back.”

Lachlan let his arms drop from his chest and said, with an airy indifference, “Oh yes. God forbid I interfere with your crack investigation. Except, maybe, to point out the solution. But if you’re not interested, fine, I’ll leave.”

He made a big production of turning away in his oversized winter jacket and ridiculous flapped cap.

With a sigh, Ned said, “Okay, shoot. You got a theory, let’s hear it.”

“Not a theory , an inevitability. This room was locked, correct? No access from the outside. So if Mr. DePoy was murdered, the killer must have been in here with him.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” said Officer Holly, already tired of him.

“You’re forgetting that Tillamook is a saltwater bay.

A deep bay, one that I assume is kept clear by dredgers.

Dredgers that employ—aha!—magnets. Giant magnets that scour the floor of the inlet to retrieve discarded metal, and the roof of this lighthouse is, I assume for the sake of my theory, metallic. ”

Holly said, “For the love of Pete, tell me you’re not suggesting...”

“A giant magnet! On a boat! Raised above the lighthouse, the magnet is used to turn the entire building like a corkscrew. The building is round, remember. Once the killer has slipped out through the gap that has opened up under the wall, the building is then screwed back into place! ”

A long pause.

“Get out,” said Holly.

“If you find the dredger with the magnet, you find the killer!” said Lachlan. “It’s that simple.”

“Get out before I taser you.”

Ned tutted. “Now, now, Officer Holly, what have I said about threatening people with your taser just because they’re annoying you?”

“Just one zap, Ned. Please.”

“Fine,” said Lachlan, head high. “I know when I’m not welcome.”

“Do you, though?” Holly asked.

“If someone will run me down to my motel, I shall be on my way.”

“I thought you were going to walk there,” said Andrew.

“With a killer on the loose? To say nothing of bears?”

“Won’t find many bears in Happy Rock,” said Doc Meadows, who was finishing up with the body. “Too shy. They stick mainly to the coast farther north. They scoop the salmon right outta the creeks. A sight to see.” He peeled off his latex gloves. “I’ll call the morgue, get someone up here.”

“We can run Lachlan down to the motel,” said Miranda. “Unless you’d like to toss that lucky coin of yours for it, Ned.”

Ned was photographing each of the tents Holly had laid out. “I’m good. You take him.”

Miranda stopped. Something Doc had said stirred thoughts in her. Salmon. Trout. Cutthroats and record catches.

“Doc,” she asked, “would you ever go fishing with someone you didn’t like? On the Nestucca River, say.”

Ned looked up, answered for him. “Y’only fish with friends, right, Doc?”

“Absolutely. If you’re gonna spend a week upriver with someone, it’s got to be someone whose company you enjoy.”

Ned beamed because Ned and Doc went fishing on the Nestucca every year. Occasionally, they’d ask Edgar or Owen along, but Edgar always got bored by the second day, and Owen was more interested in eating the salmon than catching it, so it was mainly just Doc and Ned.

“That’s what I thought,” said Miranda. “You wouldn’t go shopping for shoes on Rodeo Drive with someone you passionately disliked, any more than you would go fishing with an enemy, sworn or otherwise.”

A possible explanation was taking shape...