FOUR

Sergeant-Detective Bill Mathers had arrived on a day off. Otherwise, Cinq-Mars deduced, he’d be driving a department issue, given that he was the host officer with local knowledge. From the Quebec license plate to the wee sticker on a side window—even to the model of car, a Chevy Malibu—the obvious signs suggested that the black vehicle in which the men arrived was a rental. The agent, then, didn’t drive north in his own vehicle from, say, Albany, in upstate New York, or Poughkeepsie, a modest distance further south, but had flown into Montreal, picking up the car at the airport. Strange that he was here at all—that either man had been sanctioned by their respective forces to operate outside their jurisdictions. Émile was inclined to suspect the FBI guy of being a lone wolf, a renegade who was not on official assignment. At the very least, he was going to hold that thought in abeyance.

He tried again to pin him down, to scrape a nick from his shell.

“How was the weather when you left? So-so?”

Dreher looked over at him with evident caution.

“When you flew out? Cold?”

Agent Rand Dreher removed his gray leather gloves from a coat pocket. He permitted a smile to touch the edges of his lips and considered whether or not to reply. He conceded, “Forty-five, give or take. Fahrenheit, of course. Cloudy. So yeah, so-so.”

“Had to be Fahrenheit,” Cinq-Mars noted, “down there at nine-three-five.”

Fishing, he was referring to 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. The agent smiled broadly this time, if not altogether warmly. “Émile, does it make a difference? Yes. I’ve come up here from down there.”

“Merely curious,” Cinq-Mars demurred. “Pleasant flight?”

“Routine. When you fly as much as I do, nothing can be more pleasant than that. Have you been there?”

Cinq-Mars returned the look. “Washington? Or FBI Headquarters?”

“I meant the city. But either? Both?”

“The city, for cherry blossom time, and to your headquarters in other seasons.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I’m sure the record exists. This isn’t the first time you guys have tried to recruit me.”

“Not recruit.” In the cold, Dreher pulled on his gloves and deeply exhaled, his breath visible. “Just seeking your help and advice, Émile. Plain and simple. The good counsel of a famous detective. Shall we go in my car?”

“I’ll drive my own.” His guest, by lifting his abundant eyebrows, raised the obvious question, so he explained himself. “It’s a bit of a hike. More or less back toward Montreal. If I take my car, then when we’re done you can carry on, skip the long detour driving me home again.”

That made sense, so Dreher and Mathers started off ahead of him and Cinq-Mars fell in behind in his Jeep. He had things to think about—Sandra’s reaction, for one—and welcomed the solitude. “Go, Émile,” she insisted. “Go.” Almost shooing him out the door. Tacking on, “It’s in your blood, there’s no denying that.”

He expected her to acquiesce, but her enthusiasm took him by surprise.

Émile wanted to argue the point, but as his guests were pulling on their boots in his vestibule it was neither the place nor the appropriate time. Was he really failing that badly as a retiree that she was willing to shove him right back into the line of fire after, for so long, extolling the virtues of quitting? He enjoyed many aspects to retirement, and if not for his bout with pneumonia and the time on his back with cracked ribs, he might have discovered more. He guessed what was being implied here, that she cottoned on to his own dismay. Sandra might disagree, but the old job was not something he needed. He didn’t miss it. What he did miss was using his brain, and so much—too much, he’d say—of his work with horses was strictly physical. He didn’t mind the activity, he reveled in it, actually, but the lack of intellectual stimulation was beginning to gnaw at him. He felt impoverished for real human puzzles, not the crossword variety, which he was lousy at anyway, and twice he caught himself carving patterns in straw to create some unfathomable maze that only he could then resolve. He wasn’t sure at such a moment if he was searching for cosmic clues or suffering from onset Alzheimer’s. When they visited friends for an evening he covertly delved into their secret lives in ways that would have ended the meal abruptly had his wonderments surfaced. Knowing him so well, Sandra may have concluded that he needed the mental stimulus of the job, and perhaps she determined that this was a way for him to get his fix: to confer, to analyze and suggest, yet free from the stress, and particularly from the danger, that came with carrying a gold shield and a Glock.

Thinking that way, a suspicion roused in him. Had she herself contacted Bill Mathers? Was she behind this? Had Sandra suggested to his former police partner that if any out-of-the-loop dalliance came up he should consider including his old boss? The coincidence nagged him and the thought took hold, though he doubted that she ever intended for him to become involved in the investigation of a double-cop murder that was half a quadruple murder. That part came under the rubric of getting more than anyone ever imagined or bargained for.

Or, and the thought caused him to feel grim, did she think that getting him back to being a detective would assist her out the door, ease her conscience, should she choose to leave?

Cinq-Mars followed behind the odd couple of Dreher and Mathers, noticing the occasional drift of snow kicked up by their tires, the hardtop otherwise dry. To improve his mood he speculated on whether or not Bill smartened up about the shenanigans that occurred among various forces. The FBI agent would be pumping him for information on the SQ, on Montreal crime, on Cinq-Mars and his history in the Montreal Police Department, and if Bill remained as gullible as always he’d not know to censor his tongue, words might cross forbidden frontiers. He didn’t want to think ill of Bill, and was confident that his old partner took his new responsibilities seriously, but he probably remained inept when it came to trapdoors and secret codes and dirty tricks in the company of an intraforce colleague who wanted something out of him, especially when he didn’t know that he had a thing to give. By the time Dreher had filched keys to a vault of knowledge from his hip pocket and siphoned the juiciest bits from the nether parts of his cranium, Mathers would probably still not know if he just made a new best friend for life or was suckered into a sinister duel in which he was doomed from the outset.

Poor guy. He should have driven with him maybe.

Dreher, though, would notice that he was protecting him and merely bide his time. So Cinq-Mars reminded himself that he was formally and officially retired, so none of it really mattered anymore.

Or, at least, it shouldn’t.

He drove on.

He gauged the distance to the crime scene as being thirty kliks from his home, what the American would count as about twenty miles. Canadians were funny that way. In converting to the metric system, the populace had settled on its own hodgepodge system, part metric, part standard, part imperial, part hybrid, so the retired cop commonly judged distances in kilometers now, and would compare prices for a liter of gas, yet if he was buying a car he’d want to know how many miles it got to the gallon. A dichotomy that had become entrenched in the culture. He bought his beef by the kilogram, but he needed the weight of a perpetrator to be reported only in pounds. The distance between a murder victim and the murder weapon might be six meters, but the height of the victim had to be stated as six feet, or four foot ten, whatever it was, otherwise, who would know? Provide a person’s height in centimeters and no one of his generation would have a clue how tall the individual might be. Every year when he received his driver’s license renewal form he noticed his own height recorded in meters, then promptly forgot it. He was six foot three, still, in feet and inches, although these days he needed to consciously make an effort to straighten up to get close to that height. His driver’s license now lied. He’d shrunk, although his osteopath’s exercises were getting him to stretch himself out to his full length again. Partly because both miles and kilometers were provided by the speedometers of cars purchased in Canada, even though odometers registered kilometers only, he and his compatriots successfully negotiated miles into kliks and back again, but doing so with respect to temperature was always a non-starter. He, like everyone he knew, now understood Celsius and used it to communicate the temperature out-of-doors, while converting back to Fahrenheit, despite having grown up with it, seemed to require a degree in astrophysics. Unless, of course, he happened to be cooking, in which case the Fahrenheit scale prevailed.

All a perpetual muddle.

On the detective side of his mind, he calculated that if he ever wanted to discern if someone was really a Canadian or an impostor from, say, Delaware, the metric system might serve as a shibboleth. Sooner or later, the American would get it wrong, either by being too officially metric or too casually standard.

Twenty miles—thirty-two kilometers, according to his odometer—zipped by. Although close to home, Cinq-Mars was not familiar with this particular county road, which was just far enough out of the way that he rarely had reason to travel down it and had done so less than a dozen times over many years. Yet as he descended onto the plateau he was struck by how closely it shared the look and geography of the general area, and that’s when the eeriness of such a vile crime occurring, essentially, in his own backyard and among his rural neighbors, overcame him. Those poor people, slaughtered in their quiet, isolated home. Those poor cops who had gone—or so the couple, if given the chance, might have surmised—to their rescue.

Millions of other homes enjoyed similar comforts around the world and an equivalent solitude, but a more serene, quieter, or relaxed setting for a country home could not be imagined. The distant white fields sweeping up to a rim of woodlots were as still as stone, yet in their own way as majestic as a sea.

Mathers and Dreher were waiting as Cinq-Mars stepped from his car.

“How’d you know how to get here?” he asked.

“GPS,” Mathers said.

“Ah.” As his former partner gave him a skeptical glance, he added, “Yes, Bill, I know what that is. Sandra takes one on horseback rides. She can explore new trails without worrying about getting lost.”

“They are a marvel,” Rand Dreher concurred and removed the instrument from his coat pocket, admired it, then put it back.

“Do you think he used one?” Cinq-Mars inquired.

“Excuse me?”

“Our killer. He arrived in a storm, I hear, then left on a cloud. Navigating through a winter storm without landmarks is not easy. Finding your way perfectly snow blind? Impossible. Even house lights won’t guide you, not through a blizzard that intense. If he walked in under those conditions, he must have had a GPS to guide him.”

“You’re probably right,” Dreher acknowledged.

“That’s why I hate technology. For all the good they do, the bad guys use those gadgets for evil.”

The agent seemed to be perpetually evaluating the man he’d brought along. “You seem to be a good-and-evil kind of guy,” Dreher said.

He gave out a laugh. “Is that why you asked me here?” He knew that Dreher would never understand the question, so he explained himself right away. “It’s become an American trait, don’t you think? Breaking the world down into good and evil. Where else in the world do you have politicians willing to mention Satan?”

“Iran,” Dreher answered.

“True enough. You got me there. But that’s my point. Yes, I will mention good and evil. But no, I’m not like that. God has better things to do in my estimation than answer a quarterback’s prayers for a tight spiral, and so does Satan have better things to do than attack American institutions.”

“Santorum,” Dreher muttered.

“Yeah. That guy.”

“Me, too,” Dreher admitted, but as Cinq-Mars didn’t follow his thread, he explained himself. “He’s driving me nuts, that one. Mind you, I have my issues with the man whose job he’s after.”

“I didn’t think you guys were allowed to discuss politics.”

“We’re not supposed to,” the agent agreed. “But—”

Cinq-Mars finished his sentence when Dreher did not. “You’re out of the country. You’re wandering around aimlessly. You’re among friends.”

“All that. Plus, I was baited.”

Cinq-Mars acknowledged his culpability with a slight bob of his head. He took a breath. “So this is where it all transpired.”

“You don’t talk like a cop, do you?”

“I hate the lingo. You?”

Mathers, Cinq-Mars noted, was smirking.

The American tucked his hands under his armpits and hugged himself as a breach against the cold that, while not anywhere near extreme, had a bite today. “I’ll try to watch my words, Émile. So. The premises, we know, were contaminated the moment more police and an ambulance showed up. So there’s some leeway, but very little, in the exterior study of the grounds the day of the murders. Around three sides of the house, really through an arc of three hundred and thirty degrees, not a footprint could be found in the fresh snow. Obviously, the officers who were killed drove up to the house. The next vehicle was a cop car, and those officers swear that their car was only the second one to drive down that long road.”

“How would they know for sure? Another car could have followed in the same ruts, no? They wouldn’t be driving up to the farmhouse trying to notice that detail.”

Dreher agreed with him, to a point, and jumped into the conversation. “True, Émile. But their report convinced me. In part because they were trying to follow the exact track themselves, simply because it was easier to drive through deep snow that way. They commented to each other, long before they knew that it mattered, that only one car had gone ahead of them. The other thing they noticed was that the tire tracks led straight to the dead officers’ car. Had there been a second vehicle, it would have had a second destination, no? Or a separate point of departure.”

Cinq-Mars conceded the strength of that argument. “Still, the original cop car could have followed a footpath, for instance, covering it up as it drove along.”

Dreher looked to Mathers to pick this up. “Could have,” Bill agreed. “Except the roadway was scoured from beginning to end. No footprint was detected. You’d expect to find at least one misstep. As well, not a single footprint was found once the investigators got to the highway. If due to some unfathomable fluke the squad car perfectly covered up prints on the driveway, that would still not be possible on the highway. So where were those prints? Even if they only show somebody getting into a car, where were they?”

“A mystery,” Cinq-Mars concurred. He couldn’t deny his old partner’s point of view. His blood, the blood his wife had mentioned, was warming to this challenge.

“GPS in a snowstorm gets our guy here,” Dreher summed up, “but how did he escape after the storm without leaving a trace?”

“That’s what has the SQ—and me—stumped,” Mathers acknowledged. He was saying one thing but looking at Cinq-Mars in an odd way. He seemed smug.

“What?” the older man asked.

The jacket he wore, which went down just below the waist, was fluffy with a bright tan nylon shell. Mathers reached out and tugged on the sleeve.

“That’s down. Is that down?”

“So sue me. I don’t wear heavy wool topcoats anymore. Cop coats, I call them. Are you really surprised?”

“It’s just that I’ve never seen you wear anything else in the winter. Sharp, Émile. I like the look.”

“For one thing, I don’t have a gun to hide anymore.”

“I’m serious. It’s spiffy.”

“It’s unbelievably light and warm. So take your spiffy and go to hell.”

“Shall we go inside first?” Dreher interrupted, and proceeded to lead the way. He’d been loaned a key, which sprung open the back door. The entryway in front, he explained, was busted down by the policemen first on the scene, it was assumed, and only a crude repair effected since then kept the weather out. The door was no longer operable. They went in via the kitchen where the men removed their overshoes on a mat. For Cinq-Mars, that left him in socks, but he didn’t mind as he surveyed the cosy home.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay what?” Mathers asked.

“It’s not a grow-op.” Indoor operations to grow marijuana were common in the area, but these rooms in his visual range were tidy.

“No indication, according to the SQ, that the victims were anything but legit. They weren’t real farmers though. They didn’t work the land themselves. They rented it out. They just lived on it.”

“What about the victims’ families?” Cinq-Mars inquired.

“Childless,” Dreher told him. “As far as we know. Old enough in their fifties not to have parents who are still alive, that can be expected, but no siblings have shown up either. No family pictures were found on the premises. The thing is, not much is known about these two. They seem to have come from the Maritimes originally, according to neighbors, about four years ago. The SQ is trying to track down their histories. We don’t know where they came from exactly.”

“Or why,” Cinq-Mars noted.

“Excuse me?”

“Why come here? Nobody—I mean nobody—leaves the Maritimes to live on a farm in Quebec. Not with our taxes. To go to the big city, sure, it’s exciting. But here? When there’s other places? Why would anyone do that?”

“Peace and quiet,” Dreher suggested.

“Who wants that? Most people only think they want it until they get it. But the point is, they could have found peace and quiet in the Maritimes. Besides, look what it bought these two.”

Glancing into small, main-level rooms, the three men slowly made their way to the front of the house. In the living room they came upon a chalk mark that outlined the position of one victim.

“This is a key to the killer’s modus operandi south of the border. It’s what caught the attention of my people,” Dreher revealed.

Cinq-Mars silently studied the outline as though he wasn’t listening, then asked, “What is? What’s his MO?”

“The husband or the boyfriend is always shot or knifed to death downstairs. That happens first. Then the wife or the girlfriend is killed upstairs.”

Cinq-Mars stared at the scene awhile. “What was his name?”

“Morris Lumen,” Mathers told him.

“Morris. Like Maurice, but English?”

“That’s right. His wife’s name was Adele.”

“Morris and Adele. That sounds quaint. So there’s always a dead guy?” Cinq-Mars asked Agent Dreher.

“And a dead woman.”

“Always two floors?”

“Every time. Male victim downstairs, the woman on the second floor.”

“Sometimes shot. Sometimes knifed. That doesn’t sound like the same MO.”

“In certain circumstances, the killer may have needed to be quiet.”

“How many murders?” Cinq-Mars looked directly at him. “On your side of the border?”

“Can’t tell you that yet, Émile.”

“Right. I haven’t indicated if I’ll be, as you say, involved. I find it curious.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your reticence,” Cinq-Mars told him. “It’s curious.”

“This is the way it has to be, that’s all,” Dreher confirmed.

Testy for the first time on this trip, Cinq-Mars replied, “Oh, I doubt that.”

Dreher looked angry, but said nothing.

As if trying to break that rising tension, Mathers suggested they go upstairs.

“You go,” Cinq-Mars directed them both. “I want to hang back a minute.”

Both Mathers and Dreher thought that odd. The crime scene was cold, they couldn’t imagine what might be gleaned from a chalk mark on the floor of an empty room, but dutifully they lumbered up the stairs to the second story.

Cinq-Mars kneeled over the outline of the dead body. More than anything, he wanted a moment in the quiet of this house. To soak in the atmosphere, to feel what that might tell him. He wasn’t going to explain the method to anyone, as he could scarcely explain it to himself, but in his estimation investigating officers talked too much and thought too much and never allowed the environment to have its say.

Nor did they give the mind a chance to truly think.

He couldn’t stay crouched for too long though. His knees and fragile back. Straightening, he stood still. The premises were astonishingly quiet, and somehow that felt significant. He gazed out the window at the snow, and at the adjacent barn. What was wrong with all this peacefulness? The loudest sound proved to be the footsteps of the two detectives overhead and their muffled voices, and even that was intermittent.

Cinq-Mars regarded the chalk mark again. Then the sofa took up his attention. He examined it up close, picking at the fabric. He returned to the kitchen and checked the cupboards and the pantry. Around about this time the heating system came on and he went down into the basement. He found what he was looking for beyond the oil tank, then climbed the stairs again to the first floor. He checked the TV room and another small alcove downstairs, then joined the two officers up above.

“So what did you discover?” Dreher inquired. If he had been hopeful of this partnership ahead of time, his confidence now appeared to be waning.

“Where are the animals?” Cinq-Mars asked.

“What do you mean? Horses, cows? They didn’t have any.”

“Cats, dogs. It’s a farm. What farmhouse isn’t overrun with mice without a cat or two? Where are they?”

“The reports don’t mention animals,” Mathers pointed out to him.

Dreher picked that up. “No cats. No dogs. No pigs. No hens. What does it matter? No nothing. There are no animals.”

“Then why does the living room sofa have claw marks where it’s been used as a scratching post? Why do the floors show nicks like those my dog makes when her nails have grown too long? Why do we find dog hairs and cat hairs or some kind of hair on the carpets? Why is there a full kitty-litter box in the basement, with some old droppings, if a cat hasn’t lived here? And why keep a dog’s cushion on the floor of the TV room if no dog lies on it? I suppose Morris and Adele kept cat and dog food, both, in the pantry for an occasional late-night snack on their own?”

“Holy shit,” Mathers exclaimed. “Where are the animals?”

Cinq-Mars glanced at him. “That’s my question,” he said.

Mathers held up his hands.

Agent Rand Dreher, in the meantime, appeared to be consumed by thought.

Cinq-Mars examined the chalk lines that demarcated where the policemen and the woman of the house met their fate. He could tell which represented the officers as the artist had carefully drawn the pistols found in each man’s hand. “Ask the SQ to bring in their canine squad, Bill.”

“The trail’s shit-cold, Émile. You know that.”

“The animals, Bill. You’ll find them dead in the snow somewhere nearby. If they were in the house, we’d be smelling them by now. I’m not counting on it, but their collars might relinquish a thumb print. Or something. Maybe they managed to get in a bite of flesh. Maybe a nail scratched our killer.”

“How do you know for sure they’re out there?”

“Where else would they be? The killer didn’t dig them cute little graves in the frozen ground. If he tried he’d still be digging. He just dropped them in the snow. He doesn’t expect them to be found until it melts. By then, Mother Nature will deal with the carcasses before anyone finds them in the tall spring grass. Whoever does, the assumption will be that wild animals did them in, or exposure. Nobody will care or think twice, and anyway there might be nothing left. Thinking that way, maybe our guy allowed himself to be careless. So, canine squad, Bill. Worth a shot.”

“Okay, but if he dropped them in the snow,” Mathers argued, “why can’t we just follow his steps right to them? Oh. Right. His footprints are invisible somehow.”

“He killed the animals first, Bill. That tells us that he was here a while. Perhaps waiting for his victims to show up. He killed them during, or perhaps before, the storm.”

Dreher was nodding. He finally seemed impressed. “What does this bedroom tell you?” he asked, and Mathers noticed that the man’s tone now conveyed a smidgen of respect rather than mere guarded judgment.

Cinq-Mars was looking around the space. The silence, even with the heating system engaged, kept getting to him, speaking to him, in a way. As below, the floor was stained by the mopped-up blood of the victims.

“One man was shot through the back of his head,” Mathers offered. “The other, straight through the top of his forehead.”

“The woman,” Cinq-Mars inquired. “Adele. Any signs of sexual assault?”

“Both victims had the ring fingers of their left hands severed,” Dreher replied. “Both the rings and the fingers are missing. That’s always true south of the border as well. The women, here and in the States, are found naked, but their ordeals do not include rape or any apparent sign of sexual transgression. Except, I guess, for the nudity.”

The very strangeness of all that kept the three men quiet awhile and studying the floor. Then Cinq-Mars asked, “Any surprises with the autopsies?”

No one said anything so he looked up.

Mathers seemed to be hesitating about something.

“What?” Cinq-Mars encouraged him.

“A discrepancy,” Mathers said. “At least, it felt like that to me.” By the way Dreher’s head elevated, the senior cop assumed that this was coming as news to him also, which meant that the pair had not thoroughly debriefed one another.

“Go on.”

“Something weird. The officers, the ones who got shot, they phoned in that the woman was still alive. They requested an ambulance. Yet the autopsy showed that the female victim had two gunshot wounds. Both to the head. One entered under the chin and exited out the top of her skull, which, the pathologist stated, did so much damage it could only have killed her instantly. If that is so, why did the cops call-in to say that she was still breathing?”

The three men surrounded the lines on the floor in the shape of the woman’s form. Dreher at her head, Mathers at the base of her spine, with Cinq-Mars on the opposite side of the body’s outline standing by her knees and thighs. The retired cop was the first to do so, but then each man followed suit, tucking his hands into the front pockets of his trousers and dwelling on all this.

Cinq-Mars answered, “Because she was still alive then, Bill. The fatal bullet occurred after the officers called to say that she was still alive. That’s why the officers were killed.”

“Excuse me?” queried Dreher. “How the hell do you know that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Cinq-Mars appeared to be speaking to the sketch of the woman’s shape on the hardwood floor. “What other explanation is there? The officers radioed that she was still alive. The killer overheard that conversation. At that moment their fates were sealed. He could not allow the woman to remain alive and possibly recover and identify him—or for other reasons—but in order to kill her, he had to get to her, and that meant killing the officers first, and with some haste, since an ambulance and other police were on the way.”

“Okay,” Mathers allowed. He got that much. “But how?”

Cinq-Mars gazed between the two men a moment, then looked behind him. Next, he turned back and pulled his hands from his pockets as he stepped over behind Bill Mathers. Before him stood a pair of Queen Anne chairs and between them a sturdy table which held magazines in its base and a pair of coffee coasters on its mahogany surface. “There’s your footprints in the snow,” he pointed out. Both Dreher and Mathers leaned in closer. “Only they’re in the rug.” The pale, soft-pile, oval rug that covered the surface around the chairs showed indentations the table had made in its original location. The table’s feet now stood slightly to the side of those twin marks.

“Okay, the table’s been moved slightly,” Mathers noted. “So? Are you saying that it got bumped during a struggle?”

Cinq-Mars ignored him. He returned to the hallway. Mathers followed closely behind but Dreher seemed to hold himself back. Cinq-Mars pointed up. To a trapdoor. “He stood on the table to get into the attic. He could push open the trapdoor standing on the table, and a strong man can pull himself up from there. Notice the hall runner.” He pointed to spots between his feet. “It also has slight indentations which match the table legs from when he put his weight on it. Up he goes. When the first cop poked his head out, and when he happened to look down, he was shot through the back of his skull from above. When the second cop peeked around the corner, wondering where that shot had come from, he heard something—the trapdoor being opened ajar, perhaps—and glanced up. Either that or he figured out the first bullet’s trajectory. His last split-second alive. Shot through the forehead. He jolts back, his head hits the doorjamb at this blood mark, then pitches forward.”

Mathers’s focus repeatedly swung between the chalk marks representing the two dead cops and the trapdoor in the hall ceiling. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

Cinq-Mars maintained a deliberately blithe tone when he said, “Our killer could still be up there, Bill.”

Mathers didn’t bite, but he did catch on to what transpired next.

“That means—No shit.”

“Exactly. He was up there the whole time the SQ was scouring the place looking for clues. He got to listen in to everything they said. But a word of caution, Bill, he could still be up there, listening in to us.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I’m not, truth be told. But I’m not a cop anymore. You are. What does correct procedure require of you?” As Mathers was looking around for a prop and seemed to be considering the same table the killer had used, Cinq-Mars helped him out. “I saw a stepladder in the basement.”

Mathers went down to fetch it, which made him feel somewhat like a junior detective again, a gofer, but in the company he was keeping his sergeant-detective status didn’t carry much weight. On the upper landing, Dreher sidled up next to Cinq-Mars and spoke softly.

“So the killer pulls himself into the attic. Doesn’t that leave the table underneath the trapdoor? Wouldn’t the first responders discover it when they came on the scene?”

“He has his methods. But why don’t you tell me what they are?”

“How do you suppose I can tell you that?” He wore a slight smile, and Cinq-Mars determined that he could get along with this guy if circumstances ever required him to do so. He sensed that he was no dummy, and not an FBI robot either.

“Isn’t it part of his modus operandi? Which you know. You didn’t bring me here to figure any of this out. You’ve known it all along.”

The agent raised one of his bushy eyebrows and gave him a sharp look. “Our killer brings a rope with him,” he began. “He pulls himself up, as you said, then he either lifts the chair or the table, whatever he uses, back up behind him, or he puts it back where he found it. By this point, he has tied the rope to beams in the attic—once he left rope fibers behind on the wood, scraping the wood a little—which he can then use to go up and down as he pleases. He arrives when his victims are out of the house and waits—in one case, for days—for his victims to return. In this case, I suppose he had to dispose of a dog and a cat, or cats. So he’s in the house and is familiar with the layout by the time his victims come home. In one example, we believe that the victims arrived home with friends in tow, so he remained in the attic and waited for the guests to leave. He kills on his own time, then remains in the attic until after the police arrive and eventually vacate the house, and then, and only then, does he rob the place. Even taking clues away with him sometimes. In this case, he shot the officers, I’m guessing, for the reason you gave. After that, he didn’t bother with a robbery as far as anyone can tell. That’s what’s different this time—dead cops and no theft. After killing the police officers, he knew that more were on the way. He hid in the attic, but with dead cops, he knew the crime scene would get more attention than usual. He got out while the getting was good, I’m guessing. No time for theft.”

“Or what he stole remains secret,” Cinq-Mars added.

“So now you know what I know,” Dreher said as Mathers returned up the stairs and erected the ladder under the trapdoor. He had been climbing the steps slowly, catching the tail end of the agent’s remarks.

“So why didn’t you tell us all this when we first got here?” Mathers sounded petulant.

Cinq-Mars chose to answer when Agent Dreher did not. “He’s testing me, Bill. He wants to know if I live up to my reputation.”

With a slight nod, Dreher concurred.

“I hate being tested,” Cinq-Mars declared, in a tone that conveyed exactly that sentiment. “Were you aware of that?”

“I might have guessed.”

“So mystery solved,” Mathers enthused.

His mentor cautioned him. “No, Bill. A much larger one has opened up.”

“What’s that?”

“Who called the cops to come out here in the first place?”

Surprised by the query, the two policemen currently on the job looked questioningly at one another. Neither man proposed an answer.

“Come on, guys,” Cinq-Mars chided them. “Two police officers didn’t drive out here on a whim. Somebody set them up. Or intended to set the killer up, before it all went south.”