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“Complete sentences, Miranda, remember?”

As it turned out, Ned was coming to see the same man, and as Miranda described the photograph, his face turned thoughtful. She followed Ned back to the utility room, where the man in question was calmly waiting. The photograph was gone, however.

The janitor presented Ned with his ID.

“I’m just following up with everyone who was at the bookstore last night,” Ned explained. “I understand you left early, but I’d still like to take your prints, if you don’t mind, to avoid any misunderstandings.”

A shrug. “Sure, but you’re wasting your time. You won’t find any of my fingerprints on that arrow.”

Ned’s eyes narrowed. “Who said anything about an arrow?”

“Who hasn’t? Everyone is talking about it.”

The janitor rolled his fingers on the card like a pro. Like someone who has done it before. The entire time, he ignored Miranda’s fiery gaze.

Ned turned the man’s driver’s license over in his hand. “Cephus Kudarc-Vesztes? Am I saying that right?”

“No one does.”

“And what sort of name is that?”

“Southern. I’m from New Iberia. That’s in Louisiana.”

“Says here you’re from Bakersfield.”

“I mean, before.”

“Long way to come to work as a janitor, Cephus.”

“We prefer the term custodian .”

“Who’s we?”

“Janitors.”

“Not too far to go for revenge, though, is it!?” Miranda yelled. “The photo with faces X-ed out. I recognized some of them. You hid it as soon as I left.”

“Where’s the photograph?” Ned asked.

The other man tried to brush it off with a standard-issue “She’s imagining things,” but Ned stared at him, hard, didn’t blink. Said exactly nothing.

A long silence passed between them, and Ned Buckley let the silence do its work for him.

“Fine.” Cephus retrieved the photograph from the table drawer, turned it over, and slid it across. “I know how it looks, but I was just keeping track, wondering which of the Idaho Seven would be next to die.”

“Idaho Seven, you say?” Ned studied the photo carefully. “And there you are, Cephus. The one with the handlebar mustache.”

“That’s how you slipped into the reception unnoticed!” said Miranda. “They would have known you with a mustache. Where do you get your ideas from? That was the question you threw at Ray Valentine. You were twisting the blade. Why?”

Cephus the Custodian said nothing.

“That is you, though, isn’t it?” said Ned, looking closer.

“Oh, and look, there’s Ray Valentine, the skinny kid in the back.

And a younger, spryer Kane Hamady, with his face X-ed out.

And next to him, with his face X-ed out, too, is the recently deceased Fairfax DePoy.

And here in the middle, surrounded by adoration, this older gentleman, the one with the third X across his face.

That would be the late John D. Ross, I presume? ”

“The master himself. May he rest in hotter climes.”

Ned pushed back his police cap, whistled.

“A happy gathering by this photo. Whole gang is there. I can recognize Penny by her height, even when she’s sitting down like that, practically on the master’s lap, with Wanda Stobol clinging to his left-hand side—Wanda, or whatever her name was back then.

And that mousy young woman standing off to one side, that would be Inez, yes?

Before she tattooed her cheek and dyed her hair black.

Hardly recognizable here, in her cardigan and cat-eye glasses. ”

“Wow,” said Miranda. “She truly reinvented herself.”

“We all did,” said Cephus. “Some of us were just better at it than others.”

Seven students. One master. Six who became authors—and one who never made it: Cephus, the seventh member, the young man with the handlebar ’stache.

“Ray Valentine stole my life story,” he said. “He took my experiences, my past, my identity, changed the names around, and claimed them as his own. Those stories he wrote were based on my life. Not his.”

“Hardly seems a killing matter,” said Ned.

“You’re absolutely right. It isn’t,” Cephus said. “Litigation, yes. But not murder. I didn’t kill anyone.”

“And when the litigation failed, as I’m assuming it did, what then?” asked Ned.

“ You can’t copyright an idea, ” he sneered. “That’s what they ruled. Turns out, writers can draw on real people for their stories as much as they like, so long as it’s not libelous. So ruled the judges.”

“Judges, plural? You were at it a while, then, trying to get recompense.”

“Used up the last of my savings on legal fees. Living on my pension now, and the paltry paycheck that comes with being a small-town custodian.”

“Pension, you say. You were with the force.” It wasn’t a question.

“LAPD, second lieutenant, homicide. Early retirement.”

“You showed up in Happy Rock shortly after the roster of authors was first announced. Happenstance, was it, or were you stalking someone?”

“If I wanted to kill them, I would have started with Ray, don’t you think?

I didn’t kill any of them. Not Kane or Fairfax, certainly not John D.

Ross. Natural causes, that last one. Unfortunately.

The man deserved worse. He encouraged Ray Valentine to take my stories and steal my life while the rest of them sat back and said nothing.

But like I say, I’m only keeping track, taking pleasure in watching them eat their own. ”

“If you didn’t do it, who did?” Ned asked.

“Good question. Here’s a better one: cui bono ?”

Ned wasn’t up on his Latin, but Miranda Abbott, who had played out many a fictional courtroom scene, understood immediately.

“Who benefits, you mean?” said Miranda.

“Exactly. Who has the most to gain? And who has the most to lose? Somebody put this whole thing together and then pushed over the first domino just to watch the rest topple.”

“Someone who wanted to pit the writers against each other?” Miranda asked.

For a moment, his eyes filled with pain. “You know, we were friends once. All of us.”

“The Idaho Seven,” said Miranda.

“John Ross said we were the most talented group of students he’d ever assembled.

Those were intense times. Some of us fell in love, some became rivals.

Some of us were left behind.” A thin smile surfaced.

“You want to get to the bottom of this, officer? Ask his widow—I forget her name. She’ll know who set this up.

It can’t be a coincidence, the boxes of John D.

Ross novels arriving just before those six writers arrived.

His widow will know. She’ll have the rights to the entire works of Old Blood and Thunder, including that lost manuscript. ”

Old Blood and Thunder .

That nickname, thought Miranda, something about that nickname...

“She doesn’t, though,” said Ned. “The widow. She doesn’t control her husband’s work, isn’t the executor of the John D.

Ross estate. Edgar called her this morning, told her about the double tragedies.

She seemed unsurprised, almost satisfied.

And when he asked where he should send the manuscript, she replied, ‘You keep it. I’d as soon you have it as anyone. ’”

“Hard to imagine,” said Cephus, his voice full of rue. “Huh. The great John Ross. He promised us fame, promised us great careers. He promised us many things.”

The wheels in Miranda’s head were turning. Inez had reinvented herself. They all had...

“Kane Hamady’s real name was Nigel,” Miranda said. “He was British. That’s why his voice changed when he locked himself inside the reading room, trying to solve the riddle. Under the stress of the moment, his original accent emerged.”

“It started as an exercise in voice and POV,” said Cephus.

“But it took over their lives. Ross was always playing with people’s lives.

We were like characters in a story orchestrated for his own amusement.

” His smile turned cruel. “Officer, I don’t know who killed Kane or Fairfax, but I can tell you who’s next. ”

“And who might that be?”

He tapped a finger on one of the faces in the photograph: Penny Fenland.

“I’ll be drawing an X through her soon enough, I suppose.”

“And why is that?” Ned asked, voice flat. Killers often telegraphed their intentions.

Cephus leaned back on a terse smirk. “Because she knows too much. In any circle of friends, some will always be closer than others. Kane, Fairfax, and Penny? They were thick as thieves. Look how near they’re sitting to each other in this photo, practically in each other’s laps, limbs hooked in limbs, fingers entwined.

Look at how Inez is off to one side, barely part of it, on the outside looking in.

Kane was always dismissive of Inez for the freak she was.

As for Ray Valentine and myself, we began as friends, good friends—best friends, even—until Ray betrayed me. ”

“And Wanda Stobol?”

A shrug. “She wasn’t close to any of us. But unlike Inez, she didn’t care. Couldn’t make it as an adult author, chose the children’s route instead.”

Ned pointed out, “Be that as it may, Ms. Stobol has been published. Successfully, too. But you never were, were you, Mr. Kudarc-Vesztes? That must rankle. Seems if a fellow was looking for motive, that’s where he’d start.”

“Please,” he said, his voice splintered with ice. “Call me Cephus.”

“Kane Hamady, aka Nigel—he really was a III!” said Miranda. “ Nigel Hawthorne III . Fairfax DePoy, meanwhile, was just an unnumbered kid from Jersey named Frankie. Kane and Fairfax—or rather, Nigel and Frankie—swapped lives!”

“That’s exactly right,” said Cephus.

“When did it sour? When did they cross the line to become mortal enemies?”

The janitor balked at this. “Enemies? They were never enemies.”

The news was like a thunderclap. In that moment, everything made sense: the locked door, the open transom, the creases in the page.

“We have to go back!” she cried.

“Where?” Ned wanted to know.

“To the Murder Store!”

But Ned refused to be hurried. He first took down Cephus’s statement on his whereabouts last night.

It was a plausible alibi, though one that would need checking: Cephus had left the reception early to be on custodial duty for a local ladies’ social do, which ran late, as they always did (no one drank like the Tillamook Ladies Cultural Society).

He’d locked up after they left. Witnesses would attest to that.

Only then did Ned allow himself to be pushed along by Miranda.

“We’re not exiting through the side door,” he admonished. “We’ll take the lobby like normal people. And anyway, Andrew is meeting me out front.”