It illuminated something else below as he climbed atop the third dune-the dark figure of a man sprawled facedown in the sand.
Panting sounds reached his ears; a few moments later, Barnaby Meeker hove into view and staggered toward him. Quincannon didn’t wait. He half slid down the sandhill to the motionless figure at the bottom, anchored the lantern so that the beam shone fully on the dark-clothed man, and turned him over. The staring eyes conveyed that he was beyond help. The gaping wound on his chest stated he’d been shot.
Meeker came sliding down the hill, pulled up, and emitted a cry of anguish. “Jared! Oh, my God, it’s Jared!”
Quincannon cast his gaze back along the dunes. The line of irregular footprints led straight to where Jared Meeker lay. There were no others in the vicinity except for those made by Quincannon and Barnaby Meeker.
At dawn Quincannon helped his distraught employer hitch up his wagon. There were no telephones in Carville; Meeker would have to drive to the nearest one to summon the city police and coroner. Young Jared’s body had been carried to his bedroom car, and Mrs. Meeker had held a vigil there most of the night. Despite her disparaging comments about her son, she had been inconsolable when she learned of his death. And she’d made no bones about blaming Quincannon for what had happened, screaming at him: “What kind of detective are you, allowing my poor boy to be murdered right before your eyes?”
For his part, Quincannon was in a dark humor. As unjust as Mrs. Meeker’s tirade had been, Jared Meeker had been murdered more or less before his eyes. He couldn’t have foreseen what would happen, of course, but the shooting was a potential blow to his reputation. If he failed to find out who was responsible, and why, the confounded newspapers would have a field day at his expense.
One thing was certain, and the apparent evidence to the contrary be damned: Jared Meeker had not been mortally wounded by a malevolent spirit from the Other Side. Spooks do not carry guns, nor can ectoplasm aim and fire one with deadly accuracy in foggy darkness.
When Meeker had gone on his way, Quincannon embarked on his first order of business-a talk with Artemus Crabb. Crabb had failed to put in an appearance at any time during last night’s bizarre happenings, which may or may not have an innocent explanation. The fog was still present this morning, but the wind had died down and visibility was good. The dunes lay like a desert wasteland all around him as he trudged down the left fork to Crabb’s car.
Knuckles on the rough-hewn door produced no response, neither did a brace of shouts. Not home at this hour? Quincannon used his fist on the door, and raised his call of Crabb’s name to a tolerable bellow. This produced results. Crabb was home, and had apparently been asleep. He jerked the door open, wearing a pair of loose-fitting long johns, and glared at Quincannon out of sleep-puffed eyes.
“You,” he said. “What the devil’s the idea, waking me up this early?”
Quincannon said bluntly: “One of your neighbors was murdered last night.”
“What? What’s that? Who was murdered?”
“Jared Meeker. From all appearances, he was done in by the Carville ghost.”
Crabb recoiled a step, his eyes popping wide. “The hell you say. The…ghost? Last night?”
“On the prowl again, the same as before. You didn’t see it?”
“Not me. Once was enough. I don’t want nothing to do with spooks. I bolted my door, shuttered all the windows, and went to bed with a weapon close to hand.”
“Heard nothing, either, I take it?”
“Just the wind. Where’d it happen?”
“On the dunes beyond the abandoned cars.”
“I don’t get it,” Crabb said. “How can a damned ghost shoot a man?”
“A ghost can’t. A man did.”
“What man? Who’d want to kill the Meeker kid?”
Quincannon smiled wolfishly. “Who, indeed?”
He left Crabb in the doorway and made his way past the jumble of abandoned cars, around behind the line of dunes where he’d last seen the white radiance. A careful search of the wind-smoothed sand along their backsides turned up nothing. Opposite where he had found Jared Meeker was another high-topped dune; he climbed it and inspected the sparse vegetation that grew along the crest.
Ah, just as he’d suspected. Some of the grass stalks had broken ends and a patch of gorse was gouged and mashed flat. This was where the assassin had lain to fire the fatal shot-and a marksman he was, to have been so accurate on a night like the last.
Quincannon searched behind the dune. Here and there, in places sheltered from the wind, were footprints leading to and from the abandoned cars. Then he began to range outward in the opposite direction, zigzagging back and forth among the sandhills. Gulls wheeled overhead, shrieking, as he drew nearer to the beach. The Pacific was calmer this morning, the waves breaking more quietly over the white sand.
For more than an hour he continued his hunt. He found nothing among the dunes. The long inner sweep of the beach was littered with all manner of flotsam cast up during storms and high winds-shells, bottles, tins, driftwood large and small, birds and sea creatures alive and dead. Last night’s wind had been blowing from the southeast; he ranged farther to the north, his sharp eyes scanning left and right.
Some 200 rods from where he had emerged onto the beach, he found what he was looking for. Or rather, the wreckage of what he was looking for, caught and tangled around the bare limb of a tree branch.
He extricated it carefully, examined it, and tucked it inside his coat. After which, whistling a temperance tune off-key, he retraced his path along the beach, through the dunes, and back to the Meekers’ home.
The car that had been Jared Meeker’s bedroom was the northernmost of the four. The curtains had been drawn over the windows; he went to the door, knocked discreetly, received no response. Mrs. Meeker, as he’d hoped, had given up her vigil and gone to one of the other cars. He tried the latch, found it unlocked, stepped inside, and shut the door behind him.
The dead man lay on his bed, covered by a blanket provided by his mother. The rest of the room contained a stove, a few pieces of mismatched furniture, a steamer trunk, a framed Wild West show poster depicting a cowboy riding a wildly bucking bronco, and little else. Quincannon searched the dresser drawers first, then the steamer trunk. Several items of interest were tucked inside the latter-hand tools, a ball of twine, a jar of oil-based paint, a board with four ten-penny nails driven through it, and two lead sinkers that matched in size and shape the one he’d found yesterday in the abandoned car.
He left the items where they lay and was closing the trunk’s lid when the door opened and Mrs. Meeker entered. She emitted a startled gasp when she saw him. “Mister Quincannon! How dare you come in here without permission?”
“My apologies. But it was necessary.”
“Necessary? Prowling through my dead son’s possessions?”
“To the conclusion of my investigation.”
“…Are you saying you know who murdered Jared?”
Before he could respond, a hailing shout came from outside. Barnaby Meeker had returned. And not alone. With him were the city coroner in a morgue wagon, and a plainclothes homicide detective named Hiram Dooley in a police hack driven by a bluecoat.
Dooley was middle-aged, portly, sported a thick brushy mustache, and had a complexion the exact hue of cooked beets. Stretched across his bulging middle was a gold watch chain adorned with an elk’s tooth the size of a golf ball. His first words to Quincannon were: “I’ve heard of you, laddybuck. You and that female partner of yours.”
“Only in the most glowing terms, no doubt.”
“Hah. Just because you’ve counted yourselves lucky on a few cases doesn’t mark you high in my book. I don’t like fly cops.”