Death Night. Todd Ritter
you can go,” Kat said. “Why was Constance here so late on a Friday night?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Emma said.
“Was she normally here at night?”
“In the past, no. But in the last few weeks or so, yes.”
“Was she working on something?”
“Maybe.”
Emma made no effort to elaborate, prompting Kat to say, “Either she was or she wasn’t.”
“She was. Possibly. On Thursday, she sent an e?mail to the rest of us in the historical society calling an emergency meeting.”
“About what?”
“No one knows. But I have a feeling it had something to do with all the time she was spending here lately.”
“And when did she want to have this meeting?”
“Tonight,” Emma said. “She wanted to have it tonight.”
Kat felt the yawn coming on as she guided Emma Pulsifer out of the museum via the back door. She managed to stifle it as she told Emma to expect more questions in the morning, both about Constance and about the museum itself. But once she was back inside the building, heading down the hall to the main gallery, the yawn erupted—jaw-stretching proof of just how tired she really was.
A sallow-faced man with gray hair standing in the middle of the gallery noticed—it was hard not to—and gave her a knowing smile. The man was Wallace Noble, the medical examiner, and Kat had known him since the days when her father was Perry Hollow’s police chief.
“Long night, eh?” he said in a voice made raspy by forty years of smoking.
Kat replied with another, more modest yawn. “Yep. And I’m afraid this is just the beginning of a very long morning. This case looks like it’ll keep me up for days.”
“I thought you’d be used to it by now,” Wallace said. “First the Grim Reaper killings. Then the Olmstead thing. You seem to get all the good crimes.”
“I guess I’m just lucky,” Kat said, although she knew the opposite was true. A lucky cop would be one who spent an entire career avoiding such cases. The only reason Kat felt fortunate was because she had somehow managed to survive them.
“This is far cleaner than those Reaper killings,” Wallace said. “No amateur embalming here, thank God. Remember how he attacked his victims?”
Kat gave him a slight nod. As if she could ever forget. The Grim Reaper, one of the two most evil people she had ever encountered, liked to play games. He’d place a dead animal at the scene, distracting his victims long enough for him to sneak up on them. Then he’d render them unconscious with a handkerchief doused with chloroform. Then he’d kill them.
Slowly.
Painfully.
Henry Goll had been the only one to survive.
“Well, now there’s this,” Kat said.
Her gaze drifted around the gallery, which looked far different than when she first arrived with Dutch Jansen and Emma Pulsifer in tow. The darkness that had previously enveloped them was now banished by a few well-placed klieg lights powered by a generator outside. The blinding glare highlighted the destruction, from the fire-scarred walls to the floors already warping from water damage. Shards of glass were everywhere, glinting in the light.
Above Kat, a portion of the ceiling had been eaten away, revealing both the second and third floors. She remembered from her grade-school visits that on the second floor were rooms decorated just as they would have been during the town’s founding. Above that, she assumed, was the attic, where Emma said the rest of the museum’s collection was stored.
The devastation from the fire and the water damage that followed meant there was likely very little trace evidence to be found. Still, a few crime scene techs huddled around the crawl space where Constance had been discovered. Although her body was now lying beneath a white sheet on a wheeled gurney next to Wallace, Kat still pictured her slumped over that trunk, her wool skirt wet and clinging to the back of her legs. The techs, who were probably used to seeing far worse, worked in silence. One of them, wearing a baseball cap with a penlight duct-taped to the bill, dropped into the crawl space like a seasoned spelunker.
“I’m assuming the cause of death is blunt force trauma,” Kat said.
“Probably,” Wallace replied with a nod. “She was certainly hit hard with something heavy. A single blow to the back of the head. Cracked her skull right open.”
“Any guess as to the time of death?”
“Fairly recent. The body was still warm, so I’m guessing no more than three hours ago.”
Immediately, Kat started forming a timeline of events. If Wallace was correct, Constance had died between twelve-thirty and one A.M., around the same time the fire started. Kat assumed that whoever killed her dragged the body into the crawl space before starting the fire.
“What do you think the murder weapon was?” she asked.
Wallace gave a palms-up gesture of ignorance before opening his arms wide. “Take your pick. There were probably a hundred objects in here heavy enough to do that kind of damage. Bronze statues. Household items, which were heavier back in the day than they are now. Housewives back then must have had biceps the size of bowling balls.”
“All the better to keep men like you in check,” Kat said.
Wallace let out a low chuckle that quickly morphed into a smoker’s cough and seemed to last a full minute. When he recovered, he said, “I’m off to do the autopsy now. I’ll call you as soon as I find anything.”
He started to wheel out Constance’s body, pausing long enough to pull a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and pop it between his lips.
“Don’t worry,” he said, the cigarette bobbing up and down. “I won’t light it until I get outside. Not that it’ll make much of a difference to this place.”
Once Wallace was gone, Kat crossed to the other side of the gallery. She trod lightly, careful not to step on any of the debris that littered the charred floor. What she didn’t see, oddly enough, were many evidence markers. The gallery contained exactly one, placed a few paces to the left of the museum’s front door.
Two men knelt next to the yellow fold of plastic. One of them was a stranger. The other Kat knew very well.
“Lieutenant Vasquez,” she said. “No offense, but I wish you weren’t here.”
Tony Vasquez was a detective with the Pennsylvania State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Neither the town nor the county had the manpower or expertise to handle crimes as big as homicide and arson, so the BCI was usually called to step in. As a result, Tony had worked on the Grim Reaper murders and the Charlie Olmstead disappearance. Now he was here once again.
“Frankly, I do, too.”
“I’m assuming you’re in charge.”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “Seeing how I know my way around the town by now, they figured I’d be a good point person.”
“Well, you know the score,” Kat told him. “You’re in charge. I don’t mind that you’re in charge. And I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
Lieutenant Vasquez got to his feet. In addition to being a professional cop, Tony was also an amateur bodybuilder. Those biceps the size of bowling balls that Wallace mentioned? Tony had them. His sheer size never ceased to amaze Kat. He was so big that he looked out of scale with the rest of the gallery—like Alice after nibbling on the cake that made her grow.
“It’s looking very likely that the fire hoses washed away all the evidence,” he said. “No trace. No blood spatter. If there is any evidence, it’s mixed in with this rubble. What did you