homes. You ever heard of such a thing?”
“No,” she admitted. “So the rats came along after he was dead, and they
gnawed on him. But it was only rats.
Don’t try to make it anything mystical.”
“Did I say anything?”
“You really bothered me yesterday.”
“We were only following viable leads.”
“Talking to a sorcerer, ” she said disdainfully.
“The man wasn’t a sorcerer. He was-”
“Nuts. That’s what he was. Nuts. And you stood there listening for
more than half an hour.”
Jack sighed.
“These are rat bites,” she said, “and they’ve disguised the real wounds.
We’ll have to wait for the autopsy to learn the cause of death.”
“I’m already sure it’ll be like the others. A lot of small stab wounds
under those bites.”
“You’re probably right,” she said.
Queasy, Jack turned away from the dead man.
Rebecca continued to look.
The bathroom door frame was splintered, and the lock on the door was
broken.
As Jack examined the damage, he spoke to a beefy, ruddy-faced patrolman
who was standing nearby. “You found the door like this?”
“No, no, Lieutenant. It was locked tight when we got here.”
Surprised, Jack looked up from the ruined door.
“Say what?”
Rebecca turned to face the patrolman. “Locked?”
The officer said, “See, this Parker broad . . . uh, I mean, this Miss
Parker . . . she had a key. She let herself into the house, called
for Vastagliano, figured he was still sleeping, and came upstairs to
wake him. She found the bathroom door locked, couldn’t get an answer,
and got worried he might’ve had a heart attack. She looked under the
door, saw his hand, sort of outstretched, and all that blood. She
phoned it in to 911 right away. Me and Tony-my partner-were the first
here, and we broke down the door in case the guy might still be alive,
but one look told us he wasn’t. Then we found the other guy in the
kitchen.”
“The bathroom door was locked from inside?” Jack asked.
The patrolman scratched his square, dimpled chin.
“Well, sure. Sure, it was locked from inside. Otherwise, we wouldn’t
have had to break it down, would we? And see here? See the way it
works? It’s what the locksmiths call a ‘privacy set.” It can’t be
locked from outside the bathroom.”
Rebecca scowled. “So the killer couldn’t possibly have locked it after
he was finished with Vastagliano?”
“No,” Jack said, examining the broken lock more closely. “Looks like
the victim locked himself in to avoid whoever was after him.”
“But he was wasted anyway,” Rebecca said.
“Yeah.”
“In a locked room.”
“Yeah.”
“Where the biggest window is only a narrow slit.”
“Yeah.”
“Too narrow for the killer to escape that way.”
“Much too narrow.”
“So how was it done? ”
“Damned if I know,” Jack said.
She scowled at him.
She said, “Don’t go mystical on me again.”
He said, “I never.”
“There’s an explanation.”
“I’m sure there is.”
“And we’ll find it.”
“I’m sure we will.”
“A logical explanation.”
“Of course.”
That morning, something bad happened to Penny Dawson when she went to
school.
The Wellton School, a private institution, was in a large, converted,
four-story brownstone on a clean, tree-lined street in a quite
respectable neighborhood.
The bottom floor had been remodeled to provide an acoustically perfect
music room and a small gymnasium. The second floor was given over to
classrooms for grades one through three, while grades four through six
received their instruction on the third level. The business offices and
records room were on the fourth floor.
Being a sixth grader, Penny attended class on the third floor. It was
there, in the bustling and somewhat overheated cloakroom, that the bad
thing happened.
At that hour, shortly before the start of school, the cloakroom was
filled with chattering kids struggling out of heavy coats and boots and
galoshes. Although snow hadn’t been falling this morning, the weather
forecast called for precipitation by midafternoon, and everyone was
dressed accordingly.
Snow! The first snow of the year. Even though city kids didn’t have
fields and country hills and woods in which to enjoy winter’s games, the
first snow of the season was nevertheless a magic event. Anticipation