"Oh!"
"Yeah. Let's go." I followed her to the stairs, up to the loft and across. The darkness there didn't bother her a bit. We parted at the head of the stair to the third-floor balcony. I said, "I'll come talk to you as soon as we've settled things down."
"All right." A quavery mouse voice. She was scared as hell. I didn't blame her. I was scared myself.
Chain was dead. Helped along. My favorite suspect. My almost certain killer. Gone. Out of the picture. Meaning I'd wanted to nail the wrong hide to the wall. Unless he'd tried to do unto another and got it done to him in self-defense.
I walked along the balcony to the point where, I guessed, he'd gone over. Morley and Peters were quiet now, watching me.
"He got wool pants on?" I asked.
"Yes," Morley replied.
There were strands of wool on the rail. There were scratches and flecks of skin, too, like he'd tried to grab hold as he'd gone over. Minute scraps of evidence but they made me certain he'd been shoved. I pictured him standing there, looking down, maybe talking to somebody, when he got a sudden boost with barely enough oomph on it. Maybe he'd even needed a little extra help after he'd started going.
Sometimes I suffer too much empathy for men who die untimely deaths. I picture the thing and conjure the feelings they must have felt as the realization hit them. Falling scares hell out of me. I had more than the usual ration of compassion for Chain.
What would it take, about a second of free fall? All of it intense with fear and wild desperation and vain hope, trying to adjust to take the fall and maybe, just maybe, survive?
I shuddered. This one was going to haunt me.
Trying hard not to think about it, I clumped down to the ground floor. I hurt everywhere. I wasn't in a good mood at all. "What's your story, Sarge?"
He was taken aback by my intensity. But he excused it. "We were waiting for the draug." There was a collection of instruments of mayhem lying in the fountain. I hadn't noticed before. "Kaid and Wayne were going to take the next watch, in about an hour. I had to take a leak. I didn't want to go outside so I headed for my room."
"You took a long time taking a leak."
"Found out I had to do more once I got there. You want to check? It's still warm."
"Take his word for it, Garrett." Morley isn't your dedicated investigator, willing to stir fouled chamberpots in search of damning evidence. I'm not that devoted myself. Anyway, I believed Peters. He'd have come up with an alibi less dumb if he was going to toss somebody off a balcony.
I was about out of suspects.
Which meant I had to open the whole thing up and suspect everybody again. Even the unlikelies.
Shares of the legacy were worth over six hundred thousand now. If the value of the estate wasn't falling faster than the murderer could expand his share.
Peters. Cook. Wayne. Who? For no sound reason I gave Wayne top billing. And Cook was starting to look better, though she had pretty good alibis. But alibis aren't everything.
"I guess the killer knows there's a copy of the will," I told Peters. "That means the General could be in double jeopardy."
"What?"
"After last night the killer has to worry about the other copies going, too. They do, all his risks have gone for nothing. So maybe he'll want the old man to check out before the last copy of the will does. Better find out exactly how many there were and where they're at now." I tapped my shirt to make sure I had my copy.
Not that it was particularly safe with me, considering I was no more immortal than Chain, Hawkes, or Bradon.
Snake popped into mind, and after Snake, his paintings. I had to get those inside.
But it was pouring out. Maybe headed for something worse. There was the occasional flash of lightning. I said, "Getting around to the kind of weather that suits this place. All we need is something howling and ghost lights puttering around outside."
Peters snorted. "You get the next best thing. A frisky draug." He pointed.
There it was, back at the rear again, trying to get in. A lightning flash illuminated it. I got my first good look. It was more decomposed than the others.
Peters selected a few items from the stockpile in the fountain. "Shall we take care of it?"
"That's my old sergeant, Morley. Cool in the face of the enemy."
"Uhm." He went through the arsenal himself. Here was something he could get a hold on.
"All right. I guess we should take care of it. Get it out of the way." I checked their leavings. They'd taken all the best stuff already. "Hell with this." I went and disarmed a retired knight.
I had to be getting close to the end. There weren't many suits of armor left for me to vandalize.
35
Morley sat on the fountain surround hugging cracked ribs. Peters was curled up on the floor in a pool of vomit, clutching his groin. He did his manly best not to whimper. Me, I'd been luckier. All I'd come up with was a shin bruise and a badly stomped foot. Not on the same leg. "Maybe next time I'll save myself some grief and let whoever wants kill me."
Morley gasped, "Why didn't you say the man was a hand-to-hand specialist when he was alive?"
"Don't look at me! I didn't know anything about him. Not even who he was."
Pieces of draug were scattered all over. Some still moved.
"What now?"
"Eh?"
"You burned the other two. Right?"
"One of them, I know."
"Both," Peters groaned. He got onto his knees, his forehead on the floor. His knuckles were bone white. He'd gotten hit bad. "They dumped the other one into the stable fire when they saw there wasn't no stopping it." He didn't say that in one chunk but in little gasps, a word or two at a time. The effort cost him a spate of dry heaves.
I felt for him, though not as much as I would have if I hadn't been hurting myself.
I got up. "Better make sure we got the job done." The thing looked like it was trying to get itself back together. The pieces were trying to get to a central point. I hobbled, pitching random limbs back.
"What the hell's going on down there?"
I looked up. Wayne and Kaid had appeared for their shift, at the third-floor rail. "Come on down. We're in no shape to finish this."
Wayne beat Kaid by a floor. He looked at what was left of Chain, at the pieces of rotted corpse, at Chain again. "Man. Man, oh, man. Man." He didn't say anything else till he asked, "What happened?"
I told him. Kaid arrived in time to get it all.
"Man. Man, oh, man." Wayne was scared. For the first time since I arrived I saw one of those people convinced of his own mortality.
"Hell. You're all a hundred thousand richer now."
"Man. I don't care about that. I don't need it. It ain't worth it. I'm out of here soon as it's light enough that nothing can sneak up on me."
"But... "
"Money ain't everything. You can't live it up if you're dead. I'm gone." The man was almost hysterical.
I glanced at Peters. He was preoccupied, though he'd made it to the fountain surround. He hoisted himself up and perched with his misery. He had no attention left for anything else.
Morley was no help. But he couldn't be. He didn't know the people.
I looked at Kaid. He was as pallid as a man could get, as shaken as Wayne, equally eyeball to eyeball with death. It had come home. The field was so narrow, each knew he might be next.
He swallowed about three times, then managed, "The General. Somebody's got to take care of the General."
Wayne snarled, "Let that bastard take care of himself. I'm gone. I ain't dying for his money or for him."
Pain will distract you some, but mine wasn't so all-devouring that I couldn't spend some effort trying to figure out what the hell would happen next. I wondered which of the three was acting and how he'd gotten so good.