-5-

“There is No Death” by Lambert Murphy played on the radio as John Board sat in Sam Nail’s barber chair, having his hair trimmed. He had just unfolded the morning newspaper in front of him. On the front page were war stories and on the second page he saw a photograph of a familiar location. The plank door, the patch of dirt for a front yard. The thin dog, looking at the camera. It was the outside of the shotgun shack in which he had photographed that murdered wife, two days ago. The headline read: “WIFE SLAIN, DRUNKEN HUSBAND HELD.” Then, in a sub-heading of smaller type before the article itself began: “Investigating Officers Appalled By Killer’s Savagery.”

After reading the article quickly, Board returned his attention to the photograph. Not only was the dog there, but also he remembered several of the equally thin children who appeared at the edge of the frame, also staring glumly at the camera. But there was one feature missing. Included in the shot was the alley mouth where he had seen the red-haired man smoking his cigarette—but the alley was empty, in this photograph.

And who had taken the photograph, anyway?

The offices for the Metacarpus Times were just a few blocks over from Nail’s barbershop. Board said to him, “Sam, you get some of the Times boys in here, don’t you?”

“Oh, sure. Pete Spoon…Ronny Shingle. Two of their top writers.”

“What about photographers?”

“Oh…ah…yeah. Mick O’Tool…Jacky Glass…”

“Mick O’Tool. He Irish? A redhead?”

“Oh, that he is. You can always tell when Mick’s been here…his hair stands out in this carpet.” Nail shuffled one foot through the layer of mostly dark hair that covered the floor around the chair Board sat in. “You know Mick?”

“Maybe,” Board said. “Any idea where he lives?”

“Mick? Oh, no…not off hand. Quiet, is Mick. Friendly, though. Want me to tell him you was asking about him, the next time he’s in?”

“No thanks, Sam. Maybe I’ll run into him someday. It isn’t important,” Board said.

Well, that would explain the redheaded man he had seen, wouldn’t it? After all, why would an Assassin chance hanging about a crime scene, even to gloat? It might also explain the strange, unpleasant little smile the man had given him. A newspaper photographer, smugly looking down his nose at the ghoul with his tripod under his arm. Since there was no corpse in the newspaper shot to have engaged the interest of a living camera, Board figured that O’Tool must use a mechanical camera instead. (Board himself had used a mechanical camera for most of his career, until five years ago when his superiors had given him his first live camera and insisted that he use it.) Usually when one took photos of inorganic subject matter with a live camera, the shots didn’t develop. Then again, maybe the poverty-stricken children and bedraggled dog had been sufficient to arouse a living camera.

Board had not seen a camera in the man’s hand at the time. If he were indeed this Mick O’Tool, he had either already put it away, or hadn’t yet taken it out.

Perhaps Officers Crate and Mattock had been right; he was reading too much into the killing, which might very well be as cut and dry as the murder/suicide case he had recorded before that.

And yet Board kept seeing that smile on the face of the red-haired man. And the vague, vacant frown on the face of that woman—her nakedness not enough of an intimacy or enough of a revelation to have satisfied her attacker—gutted like a fish on the floor of her sad little casket of a home.