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opening drawers and tiptoeing downstairs with them. She put on yesterday s
garments in the living room, lit only by the streetlight down the block, let
herself silently out of the house, and drove away. She stopped to buy a
takeaway latte and a large bag of pastries from an early-hours bakery, and in
the absence of legal parking, pulled across a driveway down the street from
the Gilbert house, leaving a note with her cell phone number displayed under
the wiper blade.
The house was still, the air dead and damp after two weeks of emptiness. She
went upstairs to the third floor, set her cup on Gilbert s desk, and pulled
the used ream of buff paper from the shelf under the printer. She sat in the
chair across from Gilbert s she was now convinced that he had not died there,
but still and began to count.
Her cup was empty and her fingers weary by the time she reached274. She made
a note of the number, opened the drawer of the printer and removed the buff
pages still in there, and counted them as well. She added those 22 pages to
the other, subtracted the resultant 296 from the original 1,000 sheets making
up two reams of paper, came up with 704 sheets, printed off between the
purchase of the paper Friday morning and Gilbert s death. She laboriously
divided those sheets by 118, the number of pages of the short story. Four
pages short of six complete copies of the story, which, considering that a
ream was not necessarily an exact count and her fingers might have missed a
page or two, sounded pretty close to her.
So, if Gilbert had made six copies of the story, what had he done with them?
She consulted the file she had brought with her, found the combination to the
safe, and looked inside: The ledger in the bluish folder had been entered into
evidence, but the rest of the safe s contents had been checked and left where
they were. And as she thought, one upright folder held 118 pages of buff
paper. In addition, three of the mailing envelopes lying flat on the safe s
floor held the story, addressed and ready for sending. One would go to
Jeannine Cartfield, which Kate found interesting why not Rutland? Or was the
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loose file copy for him? The other two envelopes bore names familiar to her
from Nicholson s list of expert Sherlockians, Peter Blau in Maryland, and Les
Klinger in Los Angeles. She d spoken with both men: Blau had not been in touch
with Gilbert since November, when they had spoken about a rather beaten-up
copy of a Conan Doyle novel that might or might not have the author s
signature, and Klinger had exchanged a series of e-mails with Gilbert in
January regarding corrections to a book he was putting the final touches on,
two volumes of annotations on the Sherlock Holmes stories. Both men had asked
if she knew anything about a recently discovered short story.
Four copies here, one already given to Nicholson, although not noted on the
ledger: Where was the last? Hawkin had proposed a scenario of theft and
violent confrontation: Perhaps Gilbert had, after all, been killed right here.
Not with the falcon statue, as it turned out, but with some other blunt
object, his head bound up before it could bleed, the story snatched up by his
murderer& for what purpose?
They had thought that the statue was missing, and based a scenario on that,
only to have it crumble with a phone call from Goode s Porcelain Repair. But
what was she to make of the other missing objects: a seldom-used cell phone
and a copy of the manuscript? Oh yes, and his pocket watch on a chain.
But the dump site was the key. Someone knew where to leave Gilbert s body,
someone who had seen the story. Nicholson was the obvious suspect for that,
but Nicholson had left town on Saturday morning, and the Point Bonita Park
ranger had considered it highly unlikely that the shattered padlock and the
body behind it would have been simply overlooked on that sunny day. And
Nicholson had indeed been on the road a detailed receipt from his motel
confirmed that he had checked in just before six o clock (which was right, for
having left San Francisco near noon and stopping for the meal he d charged to
his card in Red Bluff, along the way). Furthermore, he had logged on to the
motel s high-speed Internet connection for an hour and twelve minutes
beginning at eleven-forty that night, then checked out the following morning
well before seven, having eaten breakfast at the motel s buffet. He had
stopped briefly at his cousin s house in Eugene on the way north, midday on
Sunday, before arriving at his friends house in Seattle at the end of a long
day.
There could have been a conspiracy, of course, among Gilbert s
acquaintances one to murder, one to dump but evidence supporting that had yet
to appear, and in Kate s experience, such organizational tendencies among
amateurs were unlikely.
Which left her with a Mr. X. Someone who had been in the house when Gilbert
was lounging in his pajamas, someone who had seen the story (either that night
or previously) and grabbed at the chance of duplicating the body dump.
Too complicated. Much more likely to have been Mrs. Murray s parolee brother,
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