Miranda nodded. "Then we've done all we can for the time being."
"Yeah."
She waited.
"I don't quite know how to put this, Randy, so I'll just say it straight out. The rumors are getting pretty wild, but I saw your face when I told you what Amy Fowler was claiming. I know you didn't get a phone call before you and Bishop went out to the old mill house, and I know the only visitors you had were Bonnie and Seth Daniels." He paused. "I can guess the so-called anonymous tip came from them, and I have to assume there was at least some truth in what Amy claimed — as wild as it sounds. But I need to understand. About. . . uncanny hunches. About FBI agents who seem to know things they shouldn't. I need to know what's going on, Randy. And I'm asking you to tell me the truth about it."
"It won't make your life any easier," she warned bluntly.
"So what else is new?" He smiled faintly.
"Okay, then." Miranda drew a deep breath and told him the truth.
Almost all of it.
Liz had decided to keep the store open past regular hours — until eleven or until it began to snow, whichever came first. Business was fairly brisk, both in books and in coffee, not to mention gossip, and she was hardly eager to go home and spend too many hours petting her cat and wishing for things she just couldn't have.
But she was also unwilling to provide a forum where some of the more hotheaded people in town could plan to do something stupid. So when Justin Marsh came in — ostensibly for a cup of coffee, but really to sound out his fellow citizens on the depth of their fear and fury — she did her best to head him off, before he could do any serious damage.
"Where's Selena, Justin?"
"Home," he replied.
"Here, have some coffee."
"Thank you, Elizabeth, but—"
"I hear it's getting really cold out there, so I'm sure you could stand something warm inside, right?" From the corner of her eye, she was amused to see a couple of her regular customers sidle out the door, clearly intent on avoiding one of Justin's tirades.
Justin caught her wrist even though she had made no move to walk away. "Listen to me, Elizabeth. Something must be done — there's an evil in our midst!"
"I don't think you'd get an argument about that, Justin. But it's not really our job to hunt down that evil, not with the sheriff and these FBI agents working so hard at it."
His fingers tightened around her wrist, and his pale eyes took on a more-than-usually fanatical gleam. "They are lost souls wandering aimlessly," he said, lowering his voice as though to bestow a confidence. "They can't recognize the evil they seek. But I can. I know the face of the evil."
Liz was tempted to ask him to draw the face for her, but overcame the impulse. "We all have our theories, I'm sure. But accusing anybody without cause is just going to get trouble started, you know that. Listen, we all know there's a storm on the way, and right now everybody is pretty worried about that. So why don't you drink your coffee and then go home to Selena, okay, Justin?"
He released her but shook his head, scowling. "Like lambs to the slaughter. They don't know. They don't know. ..."
Liz went back to the counter, hoping he was in one of his brooding periods and no longer inclined to share his ideas and his wisdom with those around him — for the moment, at least.
John MacBride pushed his cup across the counter for a refill, murmuring, "Do you think if I sit very still, he might not see me?"
She smiled ruefully at the mayor. "It's worth a shot."
He sighed. "I should go, though. We're all set for the storm, but the voters don't seem to like to see their mayor just sitting around drinking coffee in the middle of a crisis."
"Half the town council is in here too," she pointed out. "Some looking for books, but a few just drinking coffee like you. And deputies have been in and out the last couple of hours."
"Have you seen the sheriff?"
"Not today. Between the storm and finding another body, I imagine she's pretty busy."
MacBride frowned down at his cup. "Yeah. I've gone by there a few times these last days, but she's always busy. And those FBI agents always seem to be around."
Liz knew the mayor had wholeheartedly welcomed the arrival of the FBI, and she knew why. But it didn't take The Sight to tell her he was a bit disgruntled by the continued presence of at least one of those agents, and by Randy's preoccupation with the investigation.
She felt a certain amount of sympathy, having herself waited with what patience she could muster for the man she loved to realize he hadn't been buried along with his dead wife. But all she said was, "I guess the harder they work now, the more likely they are to catch this killer quickly. We all want that."
"Of course we all want that." He must have realized how petulant he sounded, because he flushed and added quickly and with more positive emphasis, "Of course we do. It's Randy's job to make the streets safe for our citizens, and she's very good at her job. Devoted to her job. Of course."
"Mayor MacBride, I'd like to speak to you," Justin said force fully from just behind his left shoulder.
MacBride's comical grimace of dismay almost upset Liz's composure, but she stopped herself from laughing. She left him to cope with Justin, which, to his credit, he usually did very well, and went on serving her customers.
At nine o'clock, the first flakes of snow began to drift lazily downward.
Bishop eyed Miranda's closed office door as he passed, but the murmur of voices inside told him she wasn't alone, so he continued on to the conference room. He found Tony there sitting at one of the desks scowling at the screen of his laptop.
"There are," Tony said by way of greeting, "a hell of a lot of places selling tires in these parts."
"Any leads?"
"Not so you'd notice. Still trying to narrow the list to something remotely manageable. Anything new from the autopsy?"
"Sharon was right about the boy being injected with an anticoagulant — unfortunately, a fairly common one. It requires a doctor's prescription, of course, but we both know how easy it is to fake that sort of thing."
"Way too easy. There are places that never double-check the letterhead on a faxed request and never follow up on phone calls, so any prescription that looked legit was probably filled without a second thought." Tony shrugged. "I already checked with the Internet Crimes unit back at the office, and according to them it'll be virtually impossible to track the sale if he went that route. Backtrack if and when we find out who he is, possibly, but we won't find him working the other end. We can check local doctors and pharmacies, of course. Maybe we'll get lucky. Anything else?"
"Pictures on the way," Bishop said. "Everything in vivid color."
Tony grimaced, sensing the emotion rather than hearing anything in Bishop's calm voice. "Not a lot of fun, huh? I hate autopsies. Did you expect to learn anything by being at this one?"
"You mean spot something Sharon missed? Not hardly." Bishop poured a cup of coffee. "I don't know what I hoped to gain. If anything."
"Maybe you wanted to look at pure science for a while and avoid anything less . . . tangible."
"If I did, it didn't get me anywhere."
"Nothing at all unexpected about the body?"
"Nothing we didn't already know."
Tony fell silent for a moment. "I'm curious about something. Being a touch telepath, what happens when you touch a dead body?"
"Usually, nothing." Bishop sat down at his own laptop. "A couple of times, I've gotten a flash of images."
"A bright light?" Tony asked hopefully. "Anything that might possibly resemble the face of God?"