Page 36 of The Midnight Knock

Kyla supposed he had a point. Leaving the front door cracked (cold as the room was, she also had a feeling it was probably keeping the body from starting to smell), she took a long breath, went to the side of the bed, forced herself to look. Sarah Powers’s jeans had been pulled down halfway to the knees. It certainly looked sexual, maybe even nonconsensual, but when Kyla hefted the room’s chunky brass lamp and brought the light closer, she said, “I don’t see any stains.”

“Maybe the killer didn’t finish,” Hunter said. “Maybe he got interrupted. Sarah started to wiggle free, so he killed her.”

“But wouldn’t there be blood between her legs if it was rape?” Kyla said.

Ethan looked at Hunter.

Hunter looked at Ethan.

Ethan said, “You expect us to know?”

Fair point.

While Kyla replaced the lamp, Ethan took his time gazing around the room. His eyes passed over the money scattered across the long dresser, the mess of junk on the corner table, the suitcase and purse on the floor with their contents spilled everywhere. “Was Sarah reallymessy, or did someone toss this place? Did the killer come here to take something and Sarah just got in the way?”

“How would we know the difference?” Kyla said.

“I don’t know,” the boy said, but he got on his knees and started sifting through the woman’s luggage.

Kyla said, “Is there any way to figure out when exactly she died?”

Hunter frowned. “The doors to this room were open for an hour. The temperature’s been below freezing the whole time. Touch her. She’s probably stone-cold.”

Kyla really, really didn’t want to do that, but she supposed there was no way around it. She reached down and plucked up Sarah’s stiff arm from where it was stretched over the coverlet. A flood of goose bumps washed over her. Sarah was so cold she didn’t even feel human anymore.

“You’re right.”

“Meaning she could have been killed at any point between—what—six o’clock, when we all go to our rooms, and eight o’clock, when Tabitha finds the body. Two hours is a long time. It’d be hard to narrow down suspects with such a wide window.”

Kyla was inclined to agree with him, only for something to occur to her. “No. It’s actually not that wide. Me and Fernanda heard Sarah talking to someone in this room at seven thirty. A man. It sounded like an argument.”

“A man?” Ethan said, looking up from the suitcase.

“An argument?” Hunter said.

“Yes, it was definitely a man’s voice, but the man and Sarah were talking too quiet for me to hear much through the wall,” Kyla said. “But they were having an argument. That was pretty easy to tell.”

“Was that argument so bad it could have come to blows?” Ethan said.

Kyla thought of Stan Holiday’s busted lip, the restless rage that had filled him when he’d come into the motel’s cafe shortly before the body was discovered. “Maybe. The important thing is that Sarah was still alive by seven thirty. Meaning the murder actually happened in a very narrow window of time.”

Hunter leaned back against the long dresser, folding his arms,looking curious almost despite himself. “Alive at seven thirty, dead by eight o’clock. You’re right. That is manageable.”

Ethan said, “It stands to reason the killer is the man she was arguing with, right?”

“Not necessarily. We don’t know how long that conversation lasted,” Hunter said. “The mystery man could have left at 7:35 and the killer come right in after him. It wouldn’t have takenthatlong to do this. Especially if…”

He drifted off.

Kyla, for her part, couldn’t stop staring at the corpse. “Why would the killer put pillows over her face? Were they, like, ashamed of what they’d done? They didn’t want to see her?”

“No.” Fernanda finally spoke. The woman had spent the last few minutes in her thoughts, standing very near the room’s door like she hoped to slip back out the moment she could. Now, however, she took a few steps closer to the bed, squinted at the bloody pillows, nodded.

“This is a cartel trick. You place one pillow over the victim’s head to cover any screams, then place another over the neck to control the spray of blood. Look at that one, the pillow over Sarah’s neck. It has a hole in the side. That is where the knife went in.”

Fernanda wasn’t wrong. Looking closer, Kyla saw that the pillow over Sarah’s neck had a clump of something small and red frozen next to it on the coverlet. On closer inspection, she realized they were feathers—small down feathers—that had spilled from a gash in the side of the pillow. The hole in the pillow looked like it went straight through one side and out the other: a through-and-through stab. The hole shimmered, bright and crusted with blood, like a geode grown from a grave.

Steeling herself, Kyla lifted the pillow away. Hunter looked at the wound in the neck Kyla had revealed. “That’s definitely a knife puncture. And a big one, too. You could fit a letter through that hole.”